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First of all, in my day, James Cash Penney had called his hourly employees “associates,” and I guess I always had that idea in the back of my head. But the idea to try it at Wal-Mart actually occurred to me on a trip to England. HELEN WALTON: “We were on a tennis vacation to England. We were there to see Wimbledon. One day, we were walking down a street in London, and Sam, of course, stopped to look at a store—he always stopped to look in stores wherever we went—anywhere in the world, it didn’t matter. On that same trip, we lost a lot of our things in Italy when thieves broke into the car while he was looking at a big discount store. Anyway, he stopped at this one English retailing company, and I remember him saying, ‘Look at that sign. That is great. That’s what we should do.’ ” It was Lewis Company, J. M. Lewis Partnership. They had a partnership with all their associates listed up on the sign. For some reason that whole idea really excited me: a partnership with all our associates. As soon as we got home, we started calling our store workers “associates” instead of employees.
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