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Sam Walton: Made In America Kindle Edition
In a story rich with anecdotes and the "rules of the road" of both Main Street and Wall Street, Sam Walton chronicles the inspiration, heart, and optimism that propelled him to lasso the American Dream.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBantam
- Publication dateSeptember 12, 2012
- File size3.8 MB
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Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
- Rebecca A. Smith, Harvard Business Sch. Lib.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
-- San Francisco Chronicle
"It's a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there. And it's a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don't, and about sticking to your guns."
-- Sam Walton
"Here is an extraordinary success story about a man whose empire was built not with smoke and mirrors, but with good old-fashioned elbow grease."
-- Detroit Free Press
"A sure-fire all-American success story."
-- The New York Times Book Review
From the Publisher
From the Inside Flap
In a story rich with anecdotes and the "rules of the road" of both Main Street and Wall Street, Sam Walton chronicles the inspiration, heart, and optimism that propelled him to lasso the American Dream.
From the Back Cover
In a story rich with anecdotes and the "rules of the road" of both Main Street and Wall Street, Sam Walton chronicles the inspiration, heart, and optimism that propelled him to lasso the American Dream.
About the Author
John Huey served as editor-in-chief of Time Inc until 2012. The former editor of The Wall Street Journal/Europe and founding editor of Southpoint magazine, he has long reported on the business world and has profiled many of its leading personalities.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
LEARNING TO VALUE A DOLLAR
I was awake one night and turned on my radio, and I heard them announce that Sam Walton was the richest man in America. And I thought, ‘Sam Walton. Why, he was in my class.’ And I got so excited.”
—HELEN WILLIAMS,
former history and speech teacher at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri
Success has always had its price, I guess, and I learned that lesson the hard way in October of 1985 when Forbes magazine named me the so-called “richest man in America.” Well, it wasn’t too hard to imagine all those newspaper and TV folks up in New York saying “Who?” and “He lives where?” The next thing we knew, reporters and photographers started flocking down here to Bentonville, I guess to take pictures of me diving into some swimming pool full of money they imagined I had, or to watch me light big fat cigars with $100 bills while the hootchy-kootchy girls danced by the lake.
I really don’t know what they thought, but I wasn’t about to cooperate with them. So they found out all these exciting things about me, like: I drove an old pickup truck with cages in the back for my bird dogs, or I wore a Wal-Mart ball cap, or I got my hair cut at the barbershop just off the town square—somebody with a telephoto lens even snuck up and took a picture of me in the barber chair, and it was in newspapers all over the country. Then folks we’d never heard of started calling us and writing us from all over the world and coming here to ask us for money. Many of them represented worthy causes, I’m sure, but we also heard from just about every harebrained, cockamamy schemer in the world. I remember one letter from a woman who just came right out and said, “I’ve never been able to afford the $100,000 house I’ve always wanted. Will you give me the money?” They still do it to this day, write or call asking for a new car, or money to go on a vacation, or to get some dental work—whatever comes into their minds.
Now, I’m a friendly fellow by nature—I always speak to folks in the street and such—and my wife Helen is as genial and outgoing as she can be, involved in all sorts of community activities, and we’ve always lived very much out in the open. But we really thought there for a while that this “richest” thing was going to ruin our whole lifestyle. We’ve always tried to do our share, “but all of a sudden everybody expected us to pay their way too. And nosy people from the media would call our house at all hours and get downright rude when we’d tell them no, you can’t bring a TV crew out to the house, or no, we don’t want your magazine to spend a week photographing the lives of the Waltons, or no, I don’t have time to share my life story with you. It made me mad, anyway, that all they wanted to talk about was my family’s personal finances. They weren’t even interested in Wal-Mart, which was probably one of the best business stories going on anywhere in the world at the time, but it never even occurred to them to ask about the company. The impression I got is that most media folks—and some Wall Street types too—either thought we were just a bunch of bumpkins selling socks off the back of a truck, or that we were some kind of fast buck artists or stock scammers. And when they did write about the company they either got it wrong or just made fun of us.
So the Walton family almost instinctively put a pretty tight lid on personal publicity for any of us, although we kept living out in the open and going around visiting folks in the stores all the time. Fortunately, here in Bentonville, our friends and neighbors protected us from a lot of these scavengers. But I did get ambushed by the “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” guy at a tennis tournament I was playing in, and Helen talked to one of the women’s magazines for an article. The media usually portrayed me as a really cheap, eccentric recluse, sort of a hillbilly who more or less slept with his dogs in spite of having billions of dollars stashed away in a cave. Then when the stock market crashed in 1987, and Wal-Mart stock dropped along with everything else in the market, everybody wrote that I’d lost a half billion dollars. When they asked me about it I said, “It’s only paper,” and they had a good time with that.
But now I’d like to explain some of my attitudes about money—up to a point. After that, our finances—like those of any other normal-thinking American family—are nobody’s business but our own. No question about it, a lot of my attitude toward money stems from growing up during a pretty hardscrabble time in our country’s history: the Great Depression. And this heartland area we come from out here—Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas—was hard hit during that Dust Bowl era. I was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, in 1918 and lived there until I was about five, but my earliest memories are of Springfield, Missouri, where I started school, and later of the little Missouri town of Marshall. After that, we lived in Shelbina, Missouri, where I started high school, and still later Columbia, where I finished high school and went on to college.
My dad, Thomas Gibson Walton, was an awfully hard worker who got up early, put in long hours, and was honest. Completely, totally honest, remembered by most people for his integrity. He was also a bit of a character, who loved to trade, loved to make a deal for just about anything: horses, mules, cattle, houses, farms, cars. Anything. Once he traded our farm in Kingfisher for another one, near Omega, Oklahoma. Another time, he traded his wristwatch for a hog, so we’d have meat on the table. And he was the best negotiator I ever ran into. My dad had that unusual instinct to know how far he could go with someone—and did it in a way that he and the guy always parted friends—but he would embarrass me with some of the offers he would make, they were so low. That’s one reason I’m probably not the best negotiator in the world; I lack the ability to squeeze that last dollar. Fortunately, my brother Bud, who has been my partner from early on, inherited my dad’s ability to negotiate.
Dad never had the kind of ambition or confidence to build much of a business on his own, and he didn’t believe in taking on debt. When I was growing up, he had all sorts of jobs. He was a banker and a farmer and a farm-loan appraiser, and an agent for both insurance and real estate. For a few months, early in the Depression, he was out of work altogether, and eventually he went to work for his brother’s Walton Mortgage Co., which was an agent for Metropolitan Life Insurance. Dad became the guy who had to service Metropolitan’s old farm loans, most of which were in default. In twenty-nine and thirty and thirty-one, he had to repossess hundreds of farms from wonderful people whose families had owned the land forever. I traveled with him some, and it was tragic, and really hard on Dad too—but he tried to do it in a way that left those farmers with as much of their self-respect as he could. All of this must have made an impression on me as a kid, although I don’t ever remember saying anything to myself like “I’ll never be poor.”
We never thought of ourselves as poor, although we certainly didn’t have much of what you’d call disposable income lying around, and we did what we could to raise a dollar here and there. For example, my mother, Nan Walton, got the idea during the Depression to start a little milk business. I’d get up early in the morning and milk the cows, Mother would prepare and bottle the milk, and I’d deliver it after football practice in the afternoons. We had ten or twelve customers, who paid ten cents a gallon. Best of all, Mother would skim the cream and make ice cream, and it’s a wonder I wasn’t known as Fat Sam Walton in those days from all the ice cream I ate.
I also started selling magazine subscriptions, probably as young as seven or eight years old, and I had paper routes from the seventh grade all the way through college. I raised and sold rabbits and pigeons too, nothing really unusual for country boys of that era.
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B008ZPG704
- Publisher : Bantam; Reissue edition (September 12, 2012)
- Publication date : September 12, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 3.8 MB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 317 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #74,109 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #23 in Company Histories
- #40 in Biographies of Business Professionals
- #111 in Company Business Profiles (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Samuel Moore "Sam" Walton (March 29, 1918 – April 5, 1992) was an American businessman and entrepreneur best known for founding the retailers Walmart and Sam's Club.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Unknown [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book easy to read and enjoyable. They appreciate the insightful lessons it teaches about business and life. Readers describe the pacing as honest, authentic, and down-to-earth. The book offers good value for money, with the author's focus on cutting costs and adding value to customers. Overall, readers appreciate the author's humble and unique personality.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book easy to read and engaging. They describe it as a good, insightful read about an incredible individual. Readers appreciate the well-written story from Walton's perspective.
"...'re looking for a role model in career and in life, this is the right book for you...." Read more
"...This is a very easy read with no effort required, but offers a great insight into how he managed the growth of such a large corporate...." Read more
"Big fan of this book. Sam is a great entrepreneur who did things his way and who really believed in his way of doing things" Read more
"...The author's storytelling is captivating, offering readers a personal and insightful journey into Walton's remarkable journey of building and..." Read more
Customers find the book insightful and inspiring. It teaches valuable lessons about business and life in general. Readers appreciate the great concepts and principles behind Walton's decisions. They also learn from his personal sharing and case studies about how he capitalized on opportunities. The book provides an excellent look into the determination and gumption of an American entrepreneur.
"...makes this book a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs and business enthusiasts alike. A timeless guide for anyone chasing success!" Read more
"...ways, in living frugal and spending money wisely, in working hard committedly and relentlessly, in learning from many sources-copying idea here and..." Read more
"...This is a very easy read with no effort required, but offers a great insight into how he managed the growth of such a large corporate...." Read more
"...'s storytelling is captivating, offering readers a personal and insightful journey into Walton's remarkable journey of building and expanding one of..." Read more
Customers find the book honest, authentic, and down-to-earth. They appreciate its detailed account of Sam Walton's life and how Walmart was created. The book provides valuable insights into his humble nature and laid-back approach. Readers describe it as an amazing look at an American story of hard work, good values, and desire to go beyond the limit.
"...He is extremely humble and down to earth. -..." Read more
"...Sam Walton details the Wal-Mart story in satisfactory detail...." Read more
"...Remarkable is his humble nature and lay back approach to his business...." Read more
"...Sam is very honest throughout the book. It's obvious that he is very prideful about what he built with Wal-Mart...." Read more
Customers find the book offers good value for money. It focuses on cutting costs and adding value to customers. They also mention it's fast delivery.
"I love this book. His emphasis on frugality, teamwork, and adaptability makes this book a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs and business..." Read more
"...is really inspiring me in many ways, in living frugal and spending money wisely, in working hard committedly and relentlessly, in learning from many..." Read more
"...Bezos is obsessed with offering the widest selection, at the lowest prices, with satisfaction guaranteed...." Read more
"...The book is so centered on cutting costs and adding value to customers. It was very interesting to see how the company evolved and grew so quickly...." Read more
Customers like the author's personality. They find it inspiring and capture the essence of a great man. They appreciate his quirky, humble attitude and how hard he worked and dreamed. Readers describe the book as an intimate lecture on his life.
"What can I say: This is a brilliantly written book about an incredible individual telling his spectacular success story...." Read more
"...It's not even about self-mastery (although its implied). Its about a good ole boy who worked SO HARD and dreamt SO BIG that success had to come to..." Read more
"...What a great and honorable man. Im sure it would have been a lifetime experience for anyone to have been in the same room with him...." Read more
"Absolutely a joy. I love Sam Walton. So impressed with his down home attitude and his morals and values. We need more Sam's in this world." Read more
Reviews with images
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Very insightful!
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2025I love this book. His emphasis on frugality, teamwork, and adaptability makes this book a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs and business enthusiasts alike. A timeless guide for anyone chasing success!
- Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2022Sam Walton is really inspiring me in many ways, in living frugal and spending money wisely, in working hard committedly and relentlessly, in learning from many sources-copying idea here and there with yellow-pad notes and tape recorder-implementing it right away, in managing his teams and treating team as equal partners, and in being a family man despite of his workaholic nature.
Wal-Mart proves that no single factor contributes to a company's success. It started out with a passion to compete and a love for retailing business. It is getting bigger because of its core value to always deliver the best value for the customers. It copied best practice here and there and implemented it in Wal-Mart in their own way to increase their customers' experience. They also invest heavily in their associates so that their customes get the best service at their stores. At last, they build such strong distribution centers using technology when investing in technology was not really a popular decision back then. This book released in 1993, so the tech invesment was really advance at that time.
In one of the chapter, Sam said that he guessed Wal-Mart will achieve USD 100bio in sales by 2000. It did generate those revenue amount, even 30% higher, in 2000. Nowadays, in 2021, it even achieves more than 3 times of its 2000 revenues. I am really amazed with its growth although we also need to evaluate how it performs compared to Amazon these days.
At last, for you who is looking for business guru, this book can be one of your inspiration. In one of the chapters, you can find 10 business rules stated by Sam Walton. If you're looking for a role model in career and in life, this is the right book for you.
I couldn't find anything I dislike from this book, except that it is quite long, 317 pages, and I couldn't stay put in one book for too long. I have to admit that this book give me a lot of emotion. In the beginning, it brought out the ambitious and idealistic me. In the very end of the book, it led me to contemplate the meaning of life and make a promise to live a without-regret-life. His optimism and willingness to contribute even in deep illness brought me into tears. He is definitely one of my role model in life and career. Finishing this book felt like bidding farewell to a very inspiring mentor, very saddening. Rest well, Sam.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2013I’ve recently finished a fascinating book on the history of Walmart, as told by its founder, Sam Walton. Written in the last year before he died in 1992. At that time Walmart was a $53billion turnover company, and for some context, if you had bought $100 shares at its initial IPO in the early 1970’s, they would be worth $3.8million today (the shares split so many times over the years).
This is a very easy read with no effort required, but offers a great insight into how he managed the growth of such a large corporate.
He had some wonderful ideas and asked a lot from his managers – namely keeping the customer in mind at all times. He wanted everyone (and I mean everyone) to be on the shop floor at least once a week and engaging with a shopper.
There are lots of “ah ha” moments in the book (history of Sams club), why Walmart has greeters (very surprising reason), and how he is proud to say he has the biggest fleet of millionaire trucker drivers in the country (everyone has stocks in Walmart).
Also beautiful tales of how he stole ideas from all the other retailers including Kroger, Target and JCPenny.
He held all his management meetings on a Saturday morning as he didn’t believe real retailers worked 9-to-5. He also wasn’t a believer in having the company pay for things – so when the corporate headquarters got a new gym and sports centre, he said that the $3M should come out of his pocket and not out of the shoppers pocket. To this day (1992), he is proud that their offices in Bentoville will never win any design awards.
This book was on the short list for Jeff Bezos as he was inspired by Sam’s attention to the customer that he “stole” that idea for Amazon.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2025Big fan of this book. Sam is a great entrepreneur who did things his way and who really believed in his way of doing things
- Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2024"Sam Walton Made in America" is an exceptional exploration into the life and legacy of the visionary entrepreneur, Sam Walton, who founded Walmart. The author's storytelling is captivating, offering readers a personal and insightful journey into Walton's remarkable journey of building and expanding one of the world's largest retail giants.
The narrative skillfully unveils the intricacies of Walmart's culture, ideals, and foundational principles. Through the pages, readers gain a profound understanding of Sam Walton's innovative approach to business, which played a pivotal role in shaping Walmart into the global powerhouse it is today.
What sets this book apart is its ability to make the reader feel a genuine connection with Sam Walton. The narrative delves into his character, providing a deep insight into his leadership style and the ethos that drove him. The admiration for Walton and his unparalleled achievements is palpable throughout the book.
One of the notable strengths of "Sam Walton Made in America" lies in its wealth of leadership examples and entrepreneurial insights. Readers are not only treated to the story of Walmart's rise but also given practical tips and lessons on thriving as an entrepreneur. The book serves as a valuable resource for those seeking inspiration and guidance in the business world.
In conclusion, I highly recommend "Sam Walton Made in America" to anyone interested in business, leadership, and the journey of a true visionary. It's a compelling read that not only educates but also instills a deep respect for the man behind the Walmart empire. This book is a testament to the enduring impact of Sam Walton's legacy and is sure to leave a lasting impression on its readers.
Top reviews from other countries
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Epifanio Pineda GuadarramaReviewed in Mexico on October 6, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Una historia extraordinaria
La historia de Sam Walton, vista a través de su actividad incansable en Walmart, es un libro que se disfruta de principio a fin.
La energía y entusiasmo de Sam Walton te contagian en cada página. Este no es un libro motivacional, pero las anécdotas y logros increíbles que aquí se cuentan son una fuente de inspiración para cualquier persona que desee trabajar duro para lograr sus sueños.
¡Uno de los mejores libros que he leído hasta hoy!
- DeolReviewed in Canada on August 29, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Quality is good
Paperback is of good quality. Havent finished reading it yet.
- venkataramanReviewed in India on December 16, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Very good autobiography book
Very happy to read the book, where we come to know how Walmart started from small size and grew to giant size. Highly recommended for everyone to learn about how to build a company.
Happy that Sam Walton took time to share his knowledge with wider community. Highly appreciated.
- JuliusReviewed in Germany on October 4, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Very inspiring
Great story
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ROBERTReviewed in France on October 2, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Un incontournable du business
Un incontournable du business