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Who really said it

I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment

Unsourced — first printed thirteen years after he died Unknown 1918–1992 · American retailer, founder of Walmart
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Nobody has produced a source. The earliest appearance we could document is Adam L. Penenberg’s “Why Google Is Like Wal-Mart” in Wired, 21 April 2005 ↗ — a comic side-by-side listicle that files the sentence under “Quote the company most regrets” and credits it to Walton without saying where it came from. Walton died on 5 April 1992, and the line is not in the memoir he published that year.

Last verified 23 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment” widely credited to Sam Walton, but unsourced: the earliest known printing is a 2005 Wired article, thirteen years after his death, and the line is not in his memoir. Checked by Quotle.info.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Sam Walton. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the themes of work, power and truth. Theme: "I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where it actually comes from

Earliest appearance found
Wired, 21 April 2005 — 13 years posthumous
Article
Why Google Is Like Wal-Mart
Source given there
None — the line is simply signed “Sam Walton”
In his memoir?
No — complete text searched

Quote the company most regrets:
• Wal-Mart: “I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We’re going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment.” — Sam Walton
• Google: “Evil is whatever Sergey says is evil.” — Google CEO Eric Schmidt

The earliest printing we found, in full context: a joke listicle comparing Google to Wal-Mart, running the two companies’ most regretted quotations side by side. No source is given for the Walton line, and the article does not claim to have one.

Wired: “Why Google Is Like Wal-Mart” (21 April 2005)

How we verified this

  • Wikiquote’s Sam Walton page ↗ carries this sentence as the only quotation it records from him, and gives its provenance as “Attributed in” the Wired article — not as anything Walton wrote or was recorded saying.
  • We read that article in full ↗. It is a humour piece by Adam L. Penenberg, published 21 April 2005, and the sentence appears in a list headed “Quote the company most regrets”, credited to Walton with no citation.
  • We searched the complete text of Walton’s memoir, Sam Walton: Made in America (Doubleday, June 1992), in the Bantam printing whose own front matter states that it “contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition” and that “not one word has been omitted”. The copy catalogued at the Internet Archive ↗ is lending-restricted and cannot be searched from its catalogue page; the text we read is the Archive’s separately held full-text scan of that same printing, item made-in-america-sam-walton, so the search can be repeated. The sentence is not in it. Neither is the phrase “pay low wages”, nor “take advantage of that”, nor “low-benefit”.
  • Wikipedia ↗ gives Walton’s death as 5 April 1992, which puts the first documented printing thirteen years after he could have been asked about it.
  • The register is the tell. “A very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment” is the vocabulary of a labour economist describing a firm from outside, not of a retailer describing his own shop — and it is nothing like the voice of the memoir, where Walton writes “In the beginning, I was so chintzy I really didn’t pay my employees very well.” That is an observation about style, not evidence, and we have not treated it as evidence.

We cannot assign rights to a sentence with no established author. The earliest printing we located is a 2005 Wired article, which is itself in copyright to its publisher, but that tells you who owns the article rather than who wrote the words it quotes.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

This is quoted as a confession — the founder of Walmart admitting the business model out loud. There is no record of him saying it.

Sam Walton unsourced

The sentence is signed with his name wherever it appears, but no one who repeats it names a speech, interview, memo or book. Wikiquote ↗ can trace it only to a Wired article published in 2005, thirteen years after Walton died.

His memoir, Sam Walton: Made in America not there

It is often said to come from the 1992 memoir. We searched the book’s complete text and none of it is there — not the sentence, not “low-benefit”, not “take advantage of that”.

What is documented is the practice, not the quotation. Snopes ↗ rated a separate account of Walton’s minimum-wage manoeuvres Mostly True — and that fact-check never mentions this sentence.

Context

Why it mattered

The quotation gets used because the underlying charge is real and documented. Snopes ↗, drawing on the labour historian Nelson Lichtenstein’s The Retail Revolution (2009), records that retail clerks were exempt from the federal minimum wage through the 1950s, so Walton could pay as little as fifty cents an hour; that when Congress nearly doubled the wage to $1.15 an hour and tightened the exemption, Walton “hated the new minimum wage, and he would simply not abide by it”; and that the unusual structure of his stores let him duck under the new sales threshold. Snopes is careful to add that the structure was already in place for other reasons, and was not concocted solely to skirt the law.

None of which means he said this. The gap between “the man did it” and “the man admitted it in these words” is exactly the gap a quotation is supposed to close, and here nothing closes it.

Wikiquote can trace it only to a joke listicle published thirteen years after he died.

Read the full story

Walton was candid about the early years in his own book, in his own register: “In the beginning, I was so chintzy I really didn’t pay my employees very well.” That sentence is in the memoir and this one is not, which is worth noticing — a man who volunteered the first has no obvious need of the second.

What we could not establish: who first wrote the sentence. The Wired listicle is the earliest printing we found, but it presents the line as already-known rather than new, so something earlier may exist in a source we could not reach.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Work Power Truth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wired: Why Google Is Like Wal-Mart (2005)web.archive.org

The earliest printing we found — a humour listicle, no source given
Wikiquote: Sam Waltonen.wikiquote.org

Records the line as merely "attributed in" the 2005 Wired article
Internet Archive: Sam Walton, Made in America (1992)archive.org

The memoir the sentence is not in
Wikipedia: Sam Waltonen.wikipedia.org

His life, dates and the founding of Walmart
Snopes: Sam Walton and Minimum Wageweb.archive.org

A separate fact-check — rated Mostly True — on Walton's documented wage practices, which does not address this quotation

The author

About Sam Walton

Sam Walton

1918–1992 · American retailer, founder of Walmart and Sam’s Club

Samuel Moore Walton (29 March 1918 – 5 April 1992) bought a Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas in 1945 and opened the first Wal-Mart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962; Sam’s Club followed in 1983. From 1982 to 1988 he was the richest person in the United States, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He told his own story once, in Sam Walton: Made in America (1992), written with John Huey and published weeks before his death.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Earliest documented appearance: Penenberg, Adam L. “Why Google Is Like Wal-Mart.” Wired, 21 April 2005, which credits the sentence to Sam Walton without giving a source. No earlier printing, and no primary record of Walton saying or writing it, has been located.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment’?” Last verified 23 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-pay-low-wages-i-can-take-advantage-of-that-were-going-to/

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