فصل 07

7

Taking the Company Public

“When we went on the stock market, it didn’t mean anything to some of us country boys. The chairman always said I came across the Red River barefooted and hunting a job, which is almost the way it was. I didn’t even know what stock was. But I bought some, thank God, because Phil Green said, Hey, you buy some of that stock, boy.’ I bought it and I kept it because I believed in Mr. Walton, and I believed in my store. It’s real simple. I believed him when he said we could do all these things with the company. And we did.”

—al miles, first assistant manager, store number 6, Fayetteville, Arkansas, now a retired Wal-Mart executive

From the time I took out my first bank loan—the $1,800 to buy that ice cream machine for the Ben Franklin down in Newport—I was never really comfortable with debt. But I recognized it as a necessity of doing business, and I had gotten pretty good at accumulating it. For a while, I would just go down to the local bank and borrow whatever I could to build a store or buy something we needed to grow the business. That practice had gotten me in debt to practically every bank in Arkansas and southern Missouri. They believed in what we had done up to that point, and they believed we would pay them off. I always did pay them off on time, but sometimes I would borrow from one to pay the other. I had bought a bank in Bentonville, for about $300,000, just a little old bank with only about $3.5 million in deposits. But it really helped me learn a lot about financing things. I made some new acquaintances and began to study more about bankers and how they liked to do business.

I struck;, up a relationship with a guy named Jimmy Jones at Republic Bank down in Dallas, and he loaned us a million dollars. And, of course, I had tried all along to attract some equity investment from our store managers and a few relatives. So by 1970, we had seventy-eight partners invested in our company, which really wasn’t one company, but thirty-two different stores owned by a combination of different folks. My family owned the lion’s share of every store, but Helen and I were also in debt up to our eyeballs—several million dollars’ worth. I never dwell on the negative, but that debt weighed heavy on me. If something happened and everybody decided to call their notes, I kept thinking, we would be sunk. Maybe that’s what being raised in the Depression does to you, but I wanted out of that debt in the worst way.

I had talked a little bit about the idea of taking the company public, seeking advice from people like Abe Marks and some of those other discounters in that association we all belonged to, but I really hadn’t pursued anything seriously. One day in 1969 we got a call from Mike Smith, who said he wanted to come up and talk to us. Mike worked for Witt and Jack Stephens in Little Rock. Today, Stephens Inc. is the largest investment banking firm west of the Mississippi, and one of the most respected in the country. Back then it was mostly a bond house. Jack, by the way, was the fellow who had come in and successfully developed that Little Rock shopping center after I failed. So Mike Smith drove up to Bentonville. We were still in those old three rooms of offices over the lawyer’s office and the barbershop on the square. I remember Mike climbing those stairs. He is a bit of a renegade himself—he has a lot of original ideas—and during our conversation that day, he planted the seed that maybe we really were doing well enough to go public, that is, to issue stock in the company and sell it to the public.

MIKE SMITH, STEPHENS INC.:

“I went up there to see them in the fall of 1969, and it was really the height of ambition. We had only done one public offering, and I had done it, so I thought I was an expert. Sam was eager to talk because he had borrowed all the money he possibly could. I stopped at every Wal-Mart between Little Rock and Bentonville so I would know something about his stores. Of course the first thing he did was throw me in that plane of his and fly us all over Oklahoma and Missouri looking at stores.”

Not long after that, Bud and I went quail hunting up on the Robson ranch in Oklahoma, and the hunting was really good. We spent most of that day talking about our options. We wanted to expand, and we realized we weren’t generating enough profits both to expand and to pay off our debts. In fact, our cash shortage had forced us to give up five land sites where we had already planned to build new stores, so we knew we had to do something. Driving back that night, we agreed to seriously explore the possibilities of going public. It was a huge step for us, and we were concerned about losing control of the company. My son Rob had graduated from Columbia University law school the year before and had gone to work at the biggest law firm in Tulsa. We, the Walton family were his first client. As our lawyer, he also kept track of the various Wal-Mart store partnership agreements, so I asked him to start looking at all our options.

We still weren’t sure we could take the company public. Meanwhile, money was getting tight, and some of our creditors were pressuring us. I flew to Dallas and tried to borrow some more from Republic Bank, whose officers were getting nervous about what they’d already loaned us. They made it clear we had all of their money we were likely to see, and that ended our relationship. By then, Jimmy Jones had moved to a bank in New Orleans, First Commerce, so I flew down there from Dallas to see if he could help us. Jimmy came up with a $1.5 million loan, which helped us out in the short term, but it really wasn’t the answer to our long-term problem.

For various reasons, including taxes, Rob recommended restructuring our debt, consolidating it into one big loan for the company. Ron Mayer and I had heard that the Prudential was making loans to a lot of small retail chains, so we made an appointment with one of their loan officers and flew to New York. By now we really needed the money, pure and simple. I went to Prudential. I had my predictions all spelled out on my yellow legal pad, and I was sure they were going to loan us the money. I went through my five-year plan—my sales, profits, number of stores—and talked about our strategy of going to the small towns where there was no competition and told the loan officer how much business we thought there was out there waiting to be plucked. He didn’t buy it at all, told us he didn’t think a company like the Prudential could afford to gamble with us. I saved those projections for a long time, and they were all exceeded by 15 to 20 percent in the years to come.

Somehow we had a contact at another insurance company, Mass Mutual, so we went to see them. They agreed to lend us a million dollars, and, in turn, we agreed to give them our right arm and our left leg. We didn’t just pay interest, we had to give them all sorts of stock options in case we did go public. By now they had us over a barrel. I had no choice: we had to have the money. When we went public they made millions and millions on that deal.

By then, I was tired of owing money to people I knew, and I was even more tired of begging money from strangers. I made up my mind for sure that we were going to take Wal-Mart to the stock market. I let Mike Smith and Jack Stephens know we wanted to go ahead with the idea, but I also let them know they were going to have to compete for our business, just like I’ve always made everybody else compete for business with us. Also, I let them know I didn’t feel comfortable going with a Little Rock firm; I thought we needed a Wall Street underwriter. Maybe that was right, and maybe it wasn’t. I know Mike and Jack didn’t feel too good about it. But I went running off to New York to see what I could find out.

MIKE SMITH:

“Obviously, we wanted to handle the whole offering, but Sam was always one to shop around. Here’s what happened the way I remember it: Sam was up in New York on a buying trip, and he decided to go down to Wall Street and hear what some of those guys had to say, just cold calling—right off the street. He knew that White, Weld had taken public a retail chain called Pamida up in Omaha, so he went to visit them. He introduced himself to the receptionist as Sam Walton of Wal-Mart stores—like he always does—and said, ‘I want to talk to somebody about taking my company public’ She said, ‘Oh really, where are you from?’ And when he told her Bentonville, Arkansas, she said, ‘Well, we have a Mr. Remmel here, and he’s from Arkansas. Perhaps he could help you.’ And she introduced him to Buck Remmel, who was from Little Rock.”

I don’t really remember how I met Buck, but Mike might have it right. I remember introducing myself to him and saying something like, “What are the chances that you folks would be interested in backing us on this offering?” Well, he said he would look at it, and, sure enough, they decided they were interested. I still think that’s one reason the offer was so successful, because at the time White, Weld was one of the leading institutional investment banking firms. Not everyone around here agrees with me, but I’m sticking to my opinion.

MIKE SMITH:

“Sam decided—correctly at the time—that White, Weld knew more about public offerings than we did, so he let them have the business. But he told them, ‘I hope you’ll include the folks at Stephens, because they’re good friends, and they’re good people.’ White, Weld asked us if we wanted to take a third of the deal to their two-thirds. I talked it over with Jack, and he asked me what I thought of the company. I said I thought we ought to do it. And we did. Later on, in other offerings, we got a fifty-fifty piece of the deal along with White, Weld.”

So Rob started to work on the plan, which was to consolidate all these partnerships into one company and then sell about 20 percent of it to the public. At the time, our family owned probably 75 percent of the company, Bud owned 15 percent or so, some other relatives owned a percentage, Charlie Baum owned some, Willard Walker owned some, Charlie Cate owned some, Claude Harris owned some. All those early managers would borrow money from our bank to buy stock in the stores. Willard was the most skillful at getting money. He would cultivate the guys who ran the banks and they’d let him have what he wanted. Consequently, he realized fabulous returns on it. He had more ownership than any of the managers.

Rob Walton:

“Dad had a spread sheet listing all the minority ownerships in the various companies, and the problem was figuring out on what basis to value them all for the initial offering. As I recall, we basically proposed using book value. We did not do any kind of sophisticated relative evaluation of the companies which would have taken into account earnings and growth projections and all that sort of stuff. But everybody signed right up. And as far as I know, everybody’s happy today with the way it worked out.”

We were all ready to go at the beginning of 1970, and Ron Mayer and I did a dog and pony show all over the place—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago—telling everybody how great we were going to be. But before we got the stock issued, the market fell out on us, and we had to postpone the offering. We were already having unusual managers’ meetings in those days. We would all go fishing together, without wives, for four or five days at a time and talk about the business. I remember we were on one of those trips to Table Rock Dam, and I had to tell everybody that we were pulling back on the deal. But the market recovered some, and on October 1, 1970, Wal-Mart became a public company, traded over the counter. Our prospectus offered 300,000 shares at a price of $15, but it sold for $16.50. It was well received, though not widely held; we only had about 800 shareholders, most of them either institutions or folks we knew. Those who bought in that offering, or who owned some of those early partnerships and had them converted in that offering, made an absolute killing.

As everybody today knows, Wal-Mart’s stock performance, and the wealth it has created, is a story in itself. Just fifteen years ago, the market value of the company was around $135 million; today it’s over $50 billion. But here’s a better way to look at it: let’s say you bought 100 shares back in that original public offering, for $1,650. Since then, we’ve had nine two-for-one stock splits, so you would have 51,200 shares today. Within the last year, it’s traded at right under $60 a share. So your investment would have been worth right around $3 million at that price. Obviously, our stock has made a lot of folks happy over the years, and —pure and simple—that’s where the Walton family net worth has been created. It’s paid off beyond any of our dreams.

Here’s a chart that shows the course over the years of that 100 shares:

SHARES /100% SPLITS /MKT. PRICE ON SPLIT DATE

100

200 /May 1971 / $46/47 OTC

400 / March 1972 / 46/47 OTC

800 / August 1975 / 23 NYSE

1,600 / November 1980 / 50 NYSE

3,200 / June 1982 / 49 ? NYSE

6,400 / June 1983 / 81 ? NYSE

12,800 / September 1985 / 49 ¾ NYSE

25,600 / June 1987 / 66 ? NYSE

51,200 / June 1990 / 62 ½ NYSE

One funny memory about that public offering. The day it went through Ron and I were leaving New York, and at the airport we met a guy from T. Rowe Price, a money management firm in Baltimore. We were so full of ourselves that somehow we made him believe we were going to do well. He went back to Baltimore and bought a pretty large share of that stock for his firm. They held it for ten or fifteen years and became the star of their industry. We would split and split, and they would sell and sell. I don’t know how many millions they made on that stock.

HELEN WALTON:

“I realized before we went public that I didn’t want it to happen. I guess if I were going to be mad with Sam about anything, it would be over the fact that I always felt we could have gotten by without going public. Nothing about the company ever affected me as deeply, and it was at that point that I decided I had to pursue my other interests outside the company. I just hated the idea that we were going to put all our financial interests out there for everybody to see. When you go public, they can ask all kinds of questions, and the family gets involved. We just became an open book, and I hated it.”

Helen’s right, of course, about the downside of taking the company public. It did end up bringing us a lot of unwanted attention. But coming back from New York that day, I experienced one of the greatest feelings of my life, knowing that all our debts were paid off. The Walton family only owned 61 percent of Wal-Mart after that day, but we were able to pay off all those bankers, and from that day on, we haven’t borrowed one dime personally to support Wal-Mart. The company has rolled along on its own and financed itself. Going public really turned the company loose to grow, and it took a huge load off me. We had another offering later on, trying to get broader ownership of the stock so we could be traded on the New York Stock Exchange, but as a family we’ve only sold very limited amounts of Wal-Mart stock outside of those offerings. I think that has really set us apart, and, as I said, that’s the source of our net worth. We just kept that stock. Most families somewhere along the line would have said, We don’t want this rat race. We don’t need to do what we are doing. Let somebody else have it. And then either I would have retired and backed out of the company and sold it to some Dutch investor or to Kmart or Federated, or somebody like that. But I enjoyed doing what I was doing so much and seeing the thing grow and develop, and seeing our associates and partners do so well, that I never could quit.

It was always interesting to me that, except for those folks who worked in our company, our stock got very little support early on from the folks right here in northwest Arkansas. I always had the feeling that the people around here who remembered us when we had one store and three stores, or remembered me when I was president of the Rotary or the Chamber of Commerce, somehow thought we were doing it with mirrors. They couldn’t help but think we were just lucky, that we could not continue long term to do as well as we have done. I don’t think it was anything peculiar to this part of the country or me or anything like that. I think it must be human nature that when somebody homegrown gets on to something, the folks around them sometimes are the last to recognize it.

Like any other company, we obviously wanted to keep our stock price up and attract as many new investors as we could. And the way we went at that early on was about as unorthodox as everything else we’ve done. Most public companies hold annual stockholders’ meetings, and many hold sessions for Wall Street stock analysts, where they tell their company story and try to drum up support for their stock. As I told you, Mike Smith is an off-the-wall guy with good ideas and suggestions that are somewhat unorthodox. So right after we went public, Mike suggested that we might want to turn our stockholders’ meeting into an event, and we went along with him.

Most meetings are held in some hotel ballroom in a big city, and are pretty quick, formal affairs with the reading of the minutes and the passing of a few shareholder motions. A lot of them, I understand, are held in places like Wilmington, Delaware, where the companies are incorporated, in the hope that a whole lot of people won’t show up. We took the opposite approach. We figured we were already out of the way enough to discourage anybody from coming, but since we wanted to encourage folks to attend, we scheduled a whole weekend of events for them. We invited folks down from New York, Chicago, or wherever. They paid their own way down and back, but we really showed them a time.

MIKE SMITH:

“It’s true that I came up with the idea of making the annual meeting more of an event, but Sam didn’t tell you the whole reason why. I’ll never forget Wal-Mart’s first annual meeting, or I should say, meetings. I went up a day early to help prepare for it, but this friend of Sam’s—Fred Pickens from Newport—got confused on the dates and showed up a day early. So Sam decided to go ahead and hold the meeting for Fred, right there in his office. The next day we had the official annual meeting: six of us met around a table of the coffee shop there by the warehouse.

“The next year I said, ‘Sam, you’re a public company, and we ought to have a real meeting and try to get some folks to come. Let’s do it in Little Rock. You’re from Arkansas, and Little Rock is the capital of Arkansas and people can get there a lot easier than they can to Bentonville.’ He didn’t like it much, but he agreed to it. So we held the second meeting at a motel, the Coachmen’s Inn, in Little Rock. Nobody came. And he said, ‘So much for your idea, Mike.’ Well, I was getting desperate to get some analysts down to really start following the company, so I came up with the idea of bringing them all in for a weekend at Bella Vista, which is this nice development in the hills just north of Bentonville, with lots of golf courses, tennis courts, and lakes. I still remember Sam’s response to the idea when I brought it up: ‘Sounds like a big waste of money to me.’ But he decided to give it a try.”

It turned out to be a really good idea. These folks would come down, and we would assign a manager from the company to meet them at the airport and drive them around for the weekend. We wanted these investment types from the cities, including a lot of the bankers who were lending money to our company at the time, to see firsthand what we do and how we do it. We wanted them to get to know our managers as individuals and come to understand our company’s principles. And we felt like to do that they really had to come to Bentonville and see what kind of people we were, understand our integrity, our dedication, our work ethic, all the ingredients that were enabling us to outperform our competitors. They couldn’t do that back in New York. The values and the approach of most retailers were entirely different from what this crazy bunch in Arkansas was doing, and we wanted them to see it for themselves. So they would come down and we would have the stockholders’ meeting on Friday, followed by a big picnic that night. I remember one lady wore a formal gown to one of our dinners. It got quite a few curious looks. Then we would get them up early on Saturday morning and have them come to our meeting and listen to us talk merchandising and finance and distribution, or whatever we were dealing with at the time.

In the early days, it wasn’t anything like what it’s turned into now, which is the largest, most raucous stockholders’ meeting in the world. But it was different. After the meeting on Saturday, we always had a special event. One year it was a golf tournament, which is not all that unusual, I guess. But another year we went fishing on Bull Shoals Lake. And another year we took everybody on a float trip down Sugar Creek. The wildest event I remember was when we all went camping overnight in tents on the banks of Sugar Creek. That was a real fiasco. Remember now, these are a bunch of investment analysts from the big cities. Well, a coyote started howling, and hoot owls hooting, and half of these analysts stayed up all night around the campfire because they couldn’t sleep. We decided it wasn’t the best idea to try something like this with folks who weren’t accustomed to camping on the rocks in sleeping bags.

MIKE SMITH:

“These get-togethers became a big hit. The Wal-Mart folks would stay up all night barbecuing, and the analysts or other big shareholders would stay up with them to ‘help.’ But after a while, things got a little out of hand for Sam’s taste. Some of those Yankees got so drunk floating down Sugar Creek they couldn’t stay in the boat. And some of those fellows barbecuing had a few too many beers. Well, Sam isn’t a Puritan or a strict teetotaler or anything, but he can’t stand for people to get drunk. So he banned alcohol completely from the events, and, of course, they were never quite the same after that.”

They did get a little wild for me, I guess. But if nothing else, our meetings generated a lot of talk about us back on Wall Street—not all of it good, I’m sure—but the ones who paid attention understood that we were serious operators who were in it for the long haul, that we had a disciplined financial philosophy, and that we had growth on our minds. They also knew we liked to have fun, and a few of them probably thought maybe we were a little nuts.

Those meetings are just one example of how, in the early days of being a public company, we really did have to go to greater lengths than most companies to let Wall Street get to know us and understand us. Partly that was because we operated so differently from everybody else, and partly it was because we were so isolated from New York, where a lot of folks seem to think you have to be to do business on the scale and size that we are. And in the process of wooing Wall Street, we met all kinds. We’ve been blessed and appreciated by some analysts and dismissed by others who have believed all along that we are just a house of cards waiting to fall down any second.

One of our most loyal followers has been Maggie Gilliam, an analyst for First Boston who has believed in us for years, and she’s made her clients an awful lot of money by sticking to those beliefs. Here’s an excerpt from a report, one of my favorites, that she wrote:

MARGARET GILLIAM. FIRST BOSTON:

Wal-Mart is the finest-managed company we have ever followed. We think it is quite likely the finest-managed company in America, and we know of at least one investor who thinks it is the finest-managed company in the world. We do not expect to find another Wal-Mart in our lifetime…

On the other hand, I remember another analyst who came down here in the mid-seventies. I’ll never forget her visit. I had been out hunting all day, and I was pretty grubby when I came in to go out to dinner with her. My son Jim, who was head of the real estate department in those days, joined us. And he was never one for dressing up. Really, he always looks pretty grubby. We took her out, and we were extremely honest with her. We told her what we felt our weaknesses were at that time, and what some of our problems were. But we tried to explain our philosophy too, and to get her excited about all the potential we felt we had. She went back and wrote probably the darkest report on Wal-Mart that has ever been written. The impression you got from reading it was that if you hadn’t already sold your stock, it was probably too late.

Over the last ten or fifteen years, most of the analysts who’ve followed our stock have been consistent in their support, although they’ll go off us temporarily for one reason or another. By and large, though, they’ve stayed with us.

I don’t subscribe much to any of these fancy investing theories, and most people seem surprised to learn that I’ve never done much investing in anything except Wal-Mart. I believe the folks who’ve done the best with Wal-Mart stock are those who have studied the company, who have understood our strengths and our management approach, and who, like me, have just decided to invest with us for the long run.

We have a group of longtime investors in Scotland who have done it better maybe than anybody. Back in the early days of our growth, the Stephens people took us to London, where we first attracted the interest of these folks. They told us right off that they believed in investing for the long term. They said that as long as they felt good about the basics of the company, and had confidence in the management, they wouldn’t be buying and selling the way many of these fund managers do. Man, they were talking my language. Years after that first trip, we visited with them in Edinburgh, and they really laid it on for us. We have a similar group out in California.

And we also have an investor in France—his name is Pierre, and he’s done exactly the same thing. We almost drowned him that first year we floated down Sugar Creek, and I was afraid we’d never see him again. But Pierre started believing, and he started acquiring our stock and recommending it to his French fund members. He’s been with us for about fifteen years, and he’s had exceptionally good success with our company.

Our long-term investors are happy because we have consistently rewarded them with one of the highest returns on equity in American business. From 1977 to 1987, our average annual return to investors was 46 percent. And even in the middle of the recession, in 1991, we reported a return on equity of more than 32 percent.

I guess what’s annoying to executives—to anybody who tries to spend their time managing a company as big as this—is these money managers who’re always churning their investors’ accounts. You know, the stock will get to $40 or $42, and they’ll rush in there and say, “Hey, let’s sell this thing because it’s just too high. It’s an overvalued stock.” Well, to my mind, that doesn’t make much sense. As long as we’re managing our company well, as long as we take care of our people and our customers, keep our eye on those fundamentals, we are going to be successful. Of course, it takes an observing, discerning person to judge those fundamentals for himself. If I were a stockholder of Wal-Mart, or considering becoming one, I’d go into ten Wal-Mart stores and ask the folks working there, “How do you feel? How’s the company treating you?” Their answers would tell me much of what I need to know.

On this same subject, I have frequently been asked if being a widely followed stock has forced us to manage differently, to think more short term at the expense of long-term strategic planning. The answer is that we’ve always had to do a good bit of both. When you’re opening 150 stores a year the way we do these days, a lot of your planning is necessarily short term. But to sustain that kind of growth, you constantly have to consider what you’re going to be doing five years out. I think that the stock market pressure has driven us to plan further out so that there will be some consistency next year, and the year after—not only to our profitability but to our operating sales, our gross margins, and those sorts of things.

I’ve never let myself fret too much about that. We’ve had some tremendous fluctuations of our stock over time. Sometimes it will shoot up because retailing has become a fashionable sector with the investment community. Or it will plunge because somebody writes a report saying that Wal-Mart’s strategy is all wrong. When we bought a chain of stores called Kuhn’s Big K in 1981—which took us east of the Mississippi for the first time in a significant way—several reports said we were taking on more than we could handle, and that we would never make it once we got to Atlanta or New Orleans. We’ve had reports predicting that when we got to St. Louis, or wherever, and met some real competition, we would never be able to stay profitable. Our demise has been predicted ever since we hit the stock market. And whenever one of these big institutional investors reads something like that, and decides he believes it, he unloads a million shares, or 500,000 shares, and in the past that has created some fluctuations in the price of our stock.

Just a couple of years ago, we had some retail analysts worrying that we couldn’t sustain a 20 percent annual growth rate because we were getting so big. At the time, I said I would be tickled to death with 20 percent. I mean, when we were doing $25 billion a year in sales, 20 percent was $5 billion, which is bigger in itself than most retailers. But these folks thought a $5 billion increase would be a disaster for us. In the meantime, look what’s happened to the industry. Nowadays, we’re heroes because we’re still showing double-digit growth. If we do 20 percent, it’s the lead item on the national news broadcasts because they view it as an economic indicator. The point is, all those analysts may have had perfectly logical theories about why a 20 percent increase would be a disaster for us. But they failed to see that in a big economic downturn, when everybody is suffering, Wal-Mart’s fundamental strengths would keep us going strong. And we would look great compared to everybody else.

As companies get larger, with a broader following of investors, it becomes awfully tempting to get into that jet and go up to Detroit or Chicago or New York and speak to the bankers and the people who own your stock. But since we got our stock jump-started in the beginning, I feel like our time is better spent with our own people in the stores, rather than off selling the company to outsiders. I don’t think any amount of public relations experts or speeches in New York or Boston means a darn thing to the value of the stock over the long haul. I think you get what you’re worth. Not that we don’t go out of our way to keep Wall Street up to date on what’s going on with the company. For the last few years, in fact, a group called the United Shareholders Association has voted us the number-one company in the U.S. based on our responsiveness to shareholders.

What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path.

As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and our earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve. Our associates and our customers—many of whom are now stockholders too—will all be better served if we perform consistently over the next ten years, whether it is at a 15 percent rate or a 20 percent rate or a 25 percent rate.

If we fail to live up to somebody’s hypothetical projection for what we should be doing, I don’t care. It may knock our stock back a little, but we’re in it for the long run. We couldn’t care less about what is forecast or what the market says we ought to do. If we listened very seriously to that sort of stuff, we never would have gone into small-town discounting in the first place.