Category: Business

Leadership

Business, Heroism

Mitch Berg (my old buddy from the Pleistocene Age of blogging) provides a little historical perspective which, like most of Mitch’s stuff, is superbly written and crafted.  But there’s one part which got my attention, bigly:

But America is a restless, endlessly creative, impatient nation, overstocked with people who are not going to sit on their hands and wait for things to get better;  it’s a nation full of people who are descended from people who came from all over the world, uprooting everything they knew, to make things better.

I think that we forget this, sometimes, and I know that certain sections of our society — the Press, the academe, and all the Socialist-politicians — rather wish that we were not like that, because it interferes with their little plans to turn us all into vassals and serfs of the Almighty State.

But we are like that;  and that national characteristic is going to make the recovery from this Chinese bio-invasion lightning-fast and stronger than anyone can imagine.  And if anyone disagrees with this, the chances are that they are part of the problem:  the Press, the academe, and all the Socialist-politicians.

We shall overcome — not “some day”, but soon, Bubba.  Buckle yer seatbelts.

Leaving Us Alone

Business, Gummint

With all the crisis talk and “We’re all gonna diiiieeeee!”  and “Gummint must do something!”  nonsense, there’s still more proof (as if we needed it) that most of America made the right choice back in 2016 by electing God-Emperor Trump.  Here’s why:

President Donald Trump did something difficult and remarkable during the White House press briefing on Sunday: he stood up for the free market in a moment of crisis, when at least half the country is pushing him to abandon it.
A reporter asked the president why he was not using the Defense Production Act to nationalize industries to take control of companies and force them to produce needed health care equipment for treating coronavirus patients.
Trump’s answer was that the United States does not believe in nationalization, and does not need it, either.

…and he goes on to give examples.

You know, I have always preferred that our presidents have executive political experience — e.g. a state governorship (despite Jimmeh Carduh) — but of late I’m starting to revise that opinion.

I realize that Trump is quite an aberration — he’s something of an iconoclast, and not all businessmen are in his mold — but I have to tell you that I’m starting to think that we need to elect, or at least give serious consideration to presidential candidates who have made their way in successful businesses.  (I’m not talking about CEOs of corporations, necessarily, because they’re often no better than the stultified politician type.)

Can anyone imagine where we as a nation would be now had we elected Her Filthiness as POTUS instead of DJT?  There’d be a Virus Czar, a Nationalization Czar, a Facemask Czar and countless other “czars”, all equally incompetent and ineffective — and you’d better believe that we would now be in the death-grip [sic] of a UK/EU-style NHS (which, from all accounts, is proving absolutely incompetent to handle this current emergency).

We dodged a bullet back then, folks;  and we now need to do two things:

  • re-elect Trump in 2020, and
  • make sure that his successor in 2024 is of the same steel and beliefs, so that all his good work is not undone by some Hillary/Biden/Bernie clone in the future.

Otherwise:

Not to mention at least one  other charming situation:

Doing The Right Thing

Business

This from the CEO of Kroger Co. to his embattled employees:

“This is a situation none of us have ever been in, and at a time when our customers and our country truly need us, you are there every step of the way. None of this would be possible without each and every one of you, working together as one. It’s so inspiring. I can’t thank you enough for your dedication to our customers and each other. You inspire me, it is so impressive.”

And then to add real appreciation to his words, he’s awarded bonuses to all of them.

Bravo.

As an aside:  Daughter’s future hubby is a store manager for another grocery chain, and over the past month all store employees have been told, “Don’t worry about the hours;  you come to work, work as long as you can, and we’ll pay the overtime, regardless.”

Poor guy has had about six hours’ sleep ever since.  Daughter is a stern task master.

Flashback

Business, Disaster

Britain starts to panic:

A food policy expert has warned a food disaster could be imminent unless the Government implements rationing. Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University in London, has written a letter to Boris Johnson asking him to ‘initiate a health-based food rationing scheme to see the country through this crisis’.
He wrote to the Prime Minister ‘out of immediate concern about the emerging food crisis’ and in the letter described public messaging about food supply as ‘weak and unconvincing’.
His warning comes after shoppers across the country have been met with empty shelves as panic-buying takes hold.

Back when I was running a now-defunct supermarket chain’s loyalty program in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and New Hampshire (Grand Union, if anyone out there remembers them), we had a common problem with “hot” items.

Often, our buyers got such good deals from manufacturers from bulk orders that our shelf retail prices were better than the wholesale price offered by distributors to local grocery stores and bodegas.  So the small-store owners would descend on our supermarkets and buy up all the sale items, to resell them in their own stores.  Nothing wrong with that, of course — except that it took stock away from our “regular” loyal customers, who typically accounted for 70% of total sales and close to 90% of gross profit.

So I put an end to all that.  Whenever the buyers told me about their hot price discounts (which they had to, as I was also in charge of Advertising), I would do two things:  make the low price available to loyalty card holders only, and then limit the number of items at that price to two or three per day per card.  Result:  we sold the same amount of product, only it was spread across a larger number of customers.

And I designed a sub-system for item purchase limits that automatically instituted the policy whenever the daily sales rate started accelerating past a certain velocity.  So if there were storm warnings and people started to stock up on, say, batteries, the in-store stock was quite- or nearly sufficient and would-be profiteers couldn’t play their reindeer games.

I did all this, by the way, back in the mid-1990s, so it’s not like it’s a new situation.

As I look now at the panic-buying of toilet paper and hand sanitizers, and the resulting empty shelves thereof, I can’t help wondering why all grocery stores haven’t been doing that now.  I know that not all chains (Wal-Mart especially) have loyalty programs, but most of the big ones do.  Doesn’t say much for their planning, does it?

And by the way, there’s also an answer for chains who don’t  have loyalty programs:  just institute price escalation (instead of -reduction) for multiple purchases:  first two items, $1.99 each, third or more items, $8.99 each.  With today’s technology, the software change should take about an hour to implement.

Food logistics is not something government should get involved in, despite the frantic appeals of “food policy” professors.

Ungrateful

Business, Friends and Family

Here’s an interesting one, and it leaves me curiously conflicted

A millionaire has revealed he refuses to help his struggling parents pay off their mortgage so they can retire because they wouldn’t invest in his fledgling company five years ago.  The unnamed son, believed to be from the UK, explained on Reddit that he started a business in 2015, and his parents refused to invest £100 because they thought it would fail.  However in the last couple of years it’s boomed – but the son, who earns ‘borderline seven figures a year’, remains bitter about his parents’ lack of support.
The son explained he quit his office job, which paid £26,000 a year, in order to start his business in 2015 – when his parents and siblings earned twice or triple what he made.
‘When I opened my business, I asked if they wanted to invest as little as £100 in it, no one did… My entire family thought that my business was going to fail, just like I failed my sixth form,’ he wrote.
However, the company turned out to be a success and the business boomed in 2018 and 2019.
The son wrote: ‘My parents still have around £200,000 in mortgage payments left and are about to retire. Yesterday at a family reunion, my aunt asked why I don’t help them out financially considering I make more in a year than they make in a decade.’
He said he told his aunt he did not want to help because his parents had shown no belief in his venture.
‘I also told her that my parents made more than enough to put aside some money each month towards retirement, but due to their unorganised spending habits they were living pay cheque to pay cheque every month. They were making TRIPLE what I was making when I was an office boy,’ he explained.

Here’s why I’m conflicted.

I myself couldn’t do this to my parents, because parents.  (And if you need me to explain that rationale, you need help.)

On the other hand:  one of my ironclad rules in dealing with people is this:  I never forget an insult, and I never forgive an injury.  I am the world’s best friend to have — I’ll do anything to help a close friend — but screw me over or betray my trust, and there is a good chance that I’ll never speak to you again.

So in that moral context, I can understand  this young guy’s attitude towards people who didn’t help him on his way up, but I can’t forgive it.  And here’s why.

What he seems to have forgotten is that if he’d never have been born, they could probably have paid off their mortgage long before now.  But they had him, raised and nurtured him, and when he’d grown up, they let him go.  All that stuff costs money, lots of it (as any parent knows).

But all that said, I have little sympathy for the parents now, because they had the chance to help their child — for a piffling amount of money — and refused.  The essence of parenthood is to give, and give, and give — sometimes even when you can’t give any more, you still give.  Because it’s your child, that’s why.  Telling him his idea was dumb and he was going to fail (again) was a dick move — and now that he’s turned out for the better, they shouldn’t be surprised by his attitude — because they created it.

He’s angry at them for refusing to support him, and  for insulting him by recalling past failures.  The hurt goes deep, and I quite understand it.  I still couldn’t do what he’s done, because the corollary to being a part of a family is that when you’re an adult, you support your parents — and give, and give, and give — sometimes even when you can’t give anymore.

That’s family, and family is the basic building block of a happy and well-ordered society.

A man stabbed his mother to death, and as she lay dying she saw the knife had turned in his hand and he’d cut himself.  With her last breath she whispered, “Oh my son, bandage thy wound lest thou bleed to death.”

Parenthood.

A Good Pardon

Business, Good Stuff, Legal Stuff

Most presidential pardons rub me up the wrong way (e.g. Bill Clinton’s of Marc Rich) because there always seems to be something sleazy and underhanded about the people involved.

But God-Emperor Trump hasn’t put a foot wrong, and especially so with Michael Milken (who I always thought got a rough deal from the Justice Department).

Indeed, there’s an old saying that “banks only lend to you when you don’t need the money.” Milken understood this truth all too well, having discovered in the 1970s that other than for the bluest of blue-chip businesses, growth financing was exceedingly difficult to come by for the 99% of businesses that weren’t blue chip, or investment grade. Financial institutions operated on the assumption that the present predicted the future. Not so Milken. His research revealed the opposite.
Milken discovered that a corporation’s balance sheet generally measured yesterday, not tomorrow. And so he set about “democratizing” access to capital. Having attended UC Berkeley in the 1960s, Milken had embraced the desire of some within the student body to improve society. He would work tirelessly to change the world for the better too, but as he once put it, “Unlike other crusaders from Berkeley, I have chosen Wall Street as my battleground for improving society because it is here that government institutions and industries are financed.” There are no companies, no jobs, and there is no progress without investment, and Milken would vastly improve the world around him through skillful development of the companies not recognized by traditional banks and investment banks, but that would be greatly enhanced through bespoke finance.

Read the rest of the piece to get the whole story.