Card players have a saying: "It's all right to play if you keep your eyes on the deck" - which is another way of saving, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
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At Tatas, we believe that if we are not among the top three in an industry, we should look seriously at what it would take to become one of the top three players.. or think about exiting the industry.
It is not that addresses at the opening of a battle make the soldiers brave. The old veterans scarcely hear them, and recruits forget them at the first boom of the cannon. Their usefulness lies in their effect on the course of the campaign, in neutralizing rumors and false reports, in maintaining a good spirit in the camp, and in furnishing matter for camp-fire talk. The printed order of the day should fulfill these different ends.
The stores are an asset, and they have a great assortment in them and they're close to people. Being within 10 miles of 90% of America is a huge advantage, especially with fresh food at a good price. But we must also, if you think long-term and you think about what the company wants to accomplish, you must have a big and important first-party e-commerce business, and you must have a marketplace, and the things that go along with the marketplace.
It was always the plan to bring things together, but just like the structure, it needed to be separate for a while for good reasons. We couldn't pick at store level the full Supercenter for a while. It's a lot harder to receive an e-commerce order and pick a toy at Christmas on time than it is to pick the strawberries every day, because you know where they are.
One way to think about Walmart is a very large river of merchandise, moving from raw material to a customer and anytime that river of merchandise has imperfections, we either have an out of stock or we have some sort of overstock that creates additional costs, labor markdowns, accidents, damages.
We grew this business with the store operators and the merchants making all the decisions, I got to be one of the merchants and it was a lot of fun. But to put the customer in charge, you have to start with design.
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