"My boss was Ferold Arend, and he told me we were going to set a new record of opening a store in three weeks. I said okay. But he had made a mistake by a week so we really had a target date of two weeks from the day we began. We tried desperately, but we didn't quite make it. We opened on Thanksgiving Day, and the store was horrible. I was standing out in front when Sam [Walton] drove up. He saw the disaster, but he was smart enough to know how hard we'd been working and that if he told the truth we would have just disintegrated. He said, 'The store looks really good, guys.' And he drove away and left us."
In Sam's shoes I probably would have said something more accurate like "Thanks for all your hard work here, fellas," but the point is that you have to appreciate a person who knows when to ease up on the reins.
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