I got to know Sam over a number of years before I joined the company. I watched how he operated. And more than anything else, I watched how he treated people. Sam genuinely cared about other people. Sam did not have an ego. It wasn't all about Sam. Sam would talk to people in the store who were coming out of a trailer, unloading a trailer in the middle of summer, sweaty people and everything. He treated them no different than he treated the President of the United States. Because in Sam's mind, we're all equal. We're created by our maker equally. And so Sam viewed his role in the company of being the person who showed and demonstrated respect for everybody.
And I suppose that's the first thing that I really saw about him. I saw how he treated me. And then it's interesting you can watch how people treat maybe waiters and waitresses or people in the service industry. And you can tell a little bit about them by the way they treat them. And he was a very, very humble man. And so that very much appealed to me. His desire to always focus on being the best. We did not focus on being the largest. That wasn't the focus. The focus was being the best at what we did. And Sam was driven by the idea of we're in business to serve people.
Let me just share with you what Sam's vision was. His vision was to reduce the cost of living for people who shopped in our stores. And it began in small rural communities, spread to mid-size markets, spread to suburban areas and ultimately to major metro areas. And he was absolutely driven by the fact that we're going to reduce the cost of living. The second part of his vision was do it with a group of people who believe in what I believe in. And so there was a natural gravitation to Sam. He was a tough manager, but it was very obvious. He loved people. He loved to talk to people. And so those were the things that just jumped out at me about Sam that said, boy, I like the way he thinks. It's very much the way I feel about people.