I would never have amounted to anything were it not for adversity. I was forced to come up the hard way Honor, Confidence, Service, and Cooperation.
When this business was founded, it sought to win public confidence through service, for it was my conviction then, as it is now, that nothing else than right service to the public results in mutual understanding and satisfaction between customer and merchant. It was for this reason that our business was founded upon the eternal principle of the Golden Rule.
The friendly smile, the word of greeting, are certainly something fleeting and seemingly insubstantial. You can’t take them with you. But they work for good beyond your power to measure their influence. It is the service we are not obliged to give that people value most.
In setting up a business under the name and meaning of the Golden Rule, I was publicly binding myself, in my business relations, to a principle which had been a real and intimate part of my family upbringing. Our idea was to make money and build business through serving the community with fair dealing and honest value.
The store that sells its wares for less but pays little attention to the service it renders does not meet with the success of the store with courteous employees. The public is not greatly interested in saving a little money on a purchase at the expense of service. Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.
Business is not longer a matter of profits alone. Profits must come through public confidence, and public confidence is given to any merchant in proportion to the service which he gives to the public.
Business never was and never is anything but a public service. We told store managers that, unless they knew their communities and unless they were prepared to enter sympathetically into community life, they could not make a success of their stores.
A merchant who approaches business with the idea of serving the public well has nothing to fear from the competition.
No man can climb the ladder of success without first placing his foot on the bottom rung.
The profit is in the last shirt in the box.
Basically the stores were places where the folks of a town and its outlying regions could buy needed goods. For us to stay in a position to sell always at the lowest possible prices, we had to work constantly. We had to save, not only in prices paid in the wholesale markets, but on costs all along the line, right to shelves and over the counter. Stocks must turn over down to the last paper of pins a given number of times a year.
You must give the customer the best value and make a reasonable profit.
Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I’ll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I’ll give you a stock clerk.
No business can succeed in any great degree without being properly organized.
When I went to Kemmerer in 1902, I had no idea that [in 1921] we would have 313 stores...but that didn't prevent me from doing my best and working with all my might.
In retailing, the formula happens to be a basic liking for human beings, plus integrity, plus industry, plus the ability to see the other fellow’s point of view.
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