“There is only one boss… It's the customer! … the customer can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, and he can do it simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
The Customer Is the Only Boss
From Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.’s 1988 Annual Report (fiscal year ending January 31, 1988), page 6, opening the “Our Customers” section as a pull-quote attributed to Sam M. Walton. The same passage is reprinted in Walton’s posthumous 1992 memoir Sam Walton, Made in America: My Story, written with John Huey (Doubleday), where it circulates more widely; the annual-report printing predates the book by four years and ran under Walton’s signature in his lifetime.