Staples Tom Stemberg

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I came up with the name " Staples" driving from Hartford2 to Boston one day. The name at the time was going to be "8 and a half by 11" but that just didn't sound very good. I found myself thinking about clips and pens and pads and things, when suddenly I thought, "Staples! That's got a nice ring." It stuck.
We opened the first store on May 1, 1986. It started the office superstore industry. I knew firsthand how expensive and difficult it was to get the basic ingredients3 to run your office. You had to run to one store to get computer products, a second to get business machines, a third to get office supplies, a fourth to get janitorial supplies, and a fifth to get your printing and copying done. You paid high prices for all of it and the store hours were not convenient. We had spoken with many small businesses and were convinced that once they understood exactly how much they were paying for office products and how they were getting ripped off they would flock5 to our store.
We had a lot of competitors around the world in the early days, many of which have fallen by the wayside. Today we have successful stores in ...
... every ', corner of the United Kingdom, Germany, Holland, and even Portugal. We never dreamed we'd be this successful and impacting this many small businesses' lives.
Saving the customer money has been part of the Staples philosophy from the J get-go6. However, it doesn't make any difference how good our price on file ! folders is. If we're out of stock7 on your file folder and you have to take the 1 time to go somewhere else, we haven't saved you any money at all. So it's | not just saving money; its about convenience. That is our philosophy. It's our | job to make it easier to do what's most important, which is to run your enter prise, whatever the enterprise is.
What makes the Staples experience different in the customer's mind is our 55,000 associates. The customer experiences how well our front-line associates deal with solving their business problems. 8 That's why it's terribly important to hire people who care about other people. Training them well and arming them with the tools they need is a huge part of what we do. It's wonderfully rewarding to walk into a store 3,000 miles away from home, unannounced, and have a terrific shopping experience. It makes me proud.
In order to attract the best associates you need an attractive set of rewards. We made broad employee ownership one of our early goals. Through our employee stock purchase plan, options plans, and 401K plans, our employees can participate in our success. From a benefits perspective, we want to take care of their basic needs so they could focus on the right things - their career path, their fit with the company, their providing value for customers. When you look at the overall value you get by offering quality health care coverage at an affordable price, over the long term you end up doing the right thing for your shareholders.
Staples and Blue Cross Blue Shield9 are similar in that folks are responsive to your problems and will get back to you and solve them. Blue Cross makes it easier when you go to the doctor just like Staples makes it easier to buy office products.
We even have the Staples Business Rewards Card, which provides our customers with a number of benefits as a "thank you" for their business. This card has some of the same connotations10 as the Blue Cross Blue Shield card. Each of these cards is a staple11 of doing business. In both cases, you can be assured of getting the proper attention, the proper value, and being taken care of the way you'd like to be taken care of.
The problems of the entrepreneur are similar around the world but they have never gotten the respect they deserve. I'm just glad that companies like Staples and Blue Cross are paying that kind of respect to the small businessperson.
One of my great memories of Blue Cross Blue Shield is from when my mom lived in Austria. She hadn't been back to the states in many years and one time while I was visiting I went through her budget and saw that she still was paying for Blue Cross Blue Shield. I said,