force ideas to bubble up

This goes hand-in-hand with pushing responsibility down. We're always looking for new ways to encourage our associates out in the stores to push their ideas up through the system. We do a lot of this at Saturday morning meetings. We'll invite associates who have thought up something that's really worked well for their store - a particular item or a particular display - to come share those ideas with us.

The VPI (Volume Producing Item) contest is a perfect example of how we put this into practice. Everybody from the department manager level on up can choose an item of merchandise they want to promote - with big displays or whatever - and then we see whose item produces the highest volume. I've always thought of the VPI contest not just as a way to stimulate sales, but as a method of teaching our associates how to become better merchants, to show them what can be done by picking an item that's available and figuring out a creative way to sell it, or buy it, or both. It gives them the opportunity to act the way we need to in the early days. They can do crazy things, like pick an item and hang it all over a tree filled with stuffed monkeys in the middle of the store. Or drive a pickup truck into action alley and fill it with car-washing sponges.

We're not just looking for merchandising ideas from our associates. Our latest effort is a program called Yes We Can, Sam! - which, by the way, I did not name. Again, we invite hourly associates who have come up with money-saving ideas to attend our Saturday morning meeting. So far, we figure we've saved about $8 million a year off these ideas. And most of them are just common-sense kinds of things that nobody picks up on when we're all thinking about how big we are. They're the kinds of things that come from thinking small. One of my favorites came from an hourly associate in our traffic department who got to wondering why we were shipping all the fixtures we bought for our warehouses by common carrier when we own the largest private fleet of trucks in America. She figured out a program to backhaul those things on our own trucks and saved us over a half million dollars right there. So we brought her in, recognized her good thinking, and gave her a cash award. When you consider that there are 400,000 of us, it's obvious that there are more than a few good ideas out there waiting to be plucked.

Sam Walton

Sam Walton, Made in America by Sam Walton & John Huey. Bantam Books. 1992. p. 228, 229