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Sunday, June 23, 2013

Old Jewish Retailers
Posted by Jill | 11:07 AM
I can remember when you could go to a store that sold "foundation garments" and actually get fitted for a bra. You'd hate it, but there would be a middle-aged Jewish woman there who knew every single bra there was in the store. Half the time she'd be able to look at your boobs in your T-shirt and know exactly what you needed. And she wouldn't let you leave the store until you had exactly the right bra, that wouldn't ride up in the back, where the straps wouldn't fall off your shoulders, that wouldn't gap in the front or in the cups. She might tell you that you needed "a little girdle" too if you had a bit of a tummy. Sometimes she'd be like a drill sergeant, other times she'd be like someone trying to fix you up with her nephew who is such a nice buy and a pre-med student. There are still a few of those stores, like Olga's in Brooklyn and WOB (Wizard of Bras) in Oradell, NJ. But most of us walk around in bras that are too small, too large, too tight, worn out, and just plain don't fit properly. We may have hated these trips to the corset shop, but those women did right by us.

For mens' wear, there was a similar dynamic. Here in New Jersey, the big name was Schlesinger's, which closed in 1985, 66 years after its founder, Sidney Schlesinger, opened it. The location is now a Modell's, since Schlesinger had insisted that anyone buying the store had to run it in the way he did. Every guy who bought a suit at Schlesinger's looked like a million bucks. It didn't matter if you were short or fat, if you had broad shoulders or narrow one, by the time you got your suit away from Schlesinger's tailors, it fit like a custom suit.

Downtowns used to be full of this kind of store. My grandmother had one for a while. These were businesses started by first-generation Jewish immigrants who knew "a nice piece of goods" when they saw it. I don't know what it is about Jews and the garment industry, but there sure were a lot of us in it, both at the wholesale and retail level. Allan Sherman even did a song about Jewish dry goods guys -- "The Ballad of Harry Lewis", which about 1:20 into the interpretation below, contains one of the greatest puns in parody song history:



There aren't many stores anymore that offer the kind of personal service the old ones did. Today you go to Old Navy and buy some schmatte made by exploited people in the developing world making fifty cents a day. It holds up for a season, and then you throw it out and buy something new next year. But there are still relics of the old "quality and service at a fair price" doctrine.

One of them was Mens Wearhouse, a chain famous for its TV spots featuring the company's gravelly-voiced founder, George Zimmer, with the tagline, "You're going to like the way you look...I guarantee it." For some reason, Zimmer was forced out of his position as executive chairman of the company last week. No reason was given, and the move left many heads scratching, because the company had just enjoyed a first quarter profit increase of 23 percent. What we do know is that the founder shares his name with the first three syllables of the man going on trial this week in Florida for the murder of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Perhaps this was the garment industry equivalent of firing Phil Donahue at a time when critiquing the Iraq War just wasn't the done thing. Instead of doing research, just assume that the guy is a problem for a stupid reason and get rid of him.

The board of directors of Mens Wearhouse may find themselves wearing the Infamous Mantle of John Sculley, who nearly ran Apple Computer into the ground after firing Steve Jobs in the 1980s. Already the company's stock has tanked, and customers are up in arms. One Wall Strett analyst opined that the company felt Zimmer's image as a Person of Years didn't jibe with attempts to win over millennials, though this analyst has clearly not looked at millennial modes of dress lately. But the saddest thing about Zimmer's dismissal, whether out of a misguided chasing of the meager millennial dollar, or his possession of a similar name to someone in a high-profile trial, is that it's yet another nail in the coffin of the Old Jewish Retailer model, one which prioritized good customer service delivered by well-compensated employees in a family environment. I think this board will live to rue the day it decided to let Mr. Zimmer go.

Here in New Jersey, there is still one relic of this kind of business model left. It's P.C. Richard, the appliance and electronics store with a number of NJ locations, including the famous Flagship on Route 22 in Union. Richards offers decent value and knowledgeable sales staff who'll work with you and even haggle a bit, especially if you come back to the same guy every time you shop there. I've bought a Weber grill, an air conditioner, and a small freezer from MY P.C. Richard salesman, Nick, and I know that when I go back to buy something else, Nick will give me a good deal. As long as P.C. Richard is owned by the founder's family and is a privately-held company, you'll be able to get this kind of service. It's only when these businesses go public and have to answer to the Mitt Romneys of the world, that things like service and value -- and folksy founders -- must fall by the wayside in pursuit of more dollars stuffed into the pockets of the rich.

Here's a sample of the kind of guy these Wall Street assholes just jettisoned (note the millennials who DO seem to be interested in what he has to say):





UPDATE 6/25/13: Looks like the Board, which appears to have engineered Zimmer's ousting because of their own desire to stuff the pockets of the company's executives instead of its employees, has a problem on its hands.

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Monday, July 02, 2012

Hey, JP Morgan! I'll screw up royally for HALF that!
Posted by Jill | 6:08 AM
I'm enjoying this week off as the calm before the storm. Starting next week, I'm starting on a work schedule that probably won't let me take so much as a weekend day off until the end of October. I have one project with a timeline that's impossible to meet but must be met anyway, and also have to fit in a huge modification to another one within even less time. So I'm going to test the notion of vacation time being "recharging your batteries" by attempting to go through some of the crap in this house and get it ready to either freecycle or put out at the curb next week.

Oh, I don't think I'll get fired if I don't produce on time, but I will see it in my review next year, and there will be a financial hit in terms of the small bonus for which I'm eligible and raise. Besides -- I just don't like to screw up.

Now if I were like now-former JP Morgan Chase Chief Investment Officer Ina Drew, I wouldn't worry about screwing up. Because if you're a hotshot at Morgan, here's what you get when you do:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s decision to let Chief Investment Officer Ina Drew retire four days after the bank disclosed a $2 billion loss in her division allowed her to walk away with about $21.5 million in stock and options.

A 30-year JPMorgan veteran, Drew also had accumulated 661,000 unrestricted shares of common stock worth about $23.7 million based on the May 14 closing price, $9.7 million in deferred compensation and $2.6 million in pension pay as of Dec. 31, according to company filings. Altogether, Drew’s stock, pension and deferred pay come to about $57.5 million.

Imagine that. Cost your employer $2 billion and walk away with over $50 million? Who WOULDN'T take that deal?

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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

And just what do you think was the source of the money that makes you be able to afford to do this?
Posted by Jill | 6:06 AM
Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, has told his bosses to take this job and shove it -- on the op-ed page of the New York Times:

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

[snip]

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Now, I don't know how much Greg Smith has earned from the toxic environment at Goldman, but as an executive director, you have to believe it was a pretty penny -- probably enough to support himself and his family in comfort, if not quite the style to which they are acccustomed, for a good, long time; perhaps forever.

Lloyd Blankfein has been CEO at Goldman since May 31, 2006. Greg Smith was at Goldman through the financial collapse of 2008 -- and he stayed another three years. Even the most charitable view implies that he socked away enough money long after he had decided to do this that if he is blacklisted from Wall Street forever, he won't need the money.

So cry me a river, Mr. Smith. You had a chance to make a statement in 2008 when it became clear to everyone OUTSIDE of Wall Street what Blankfein was. And you stayed. I don't fault you for wanting to assure your family's future before throwing in the towel. But don't sit there now and tell me how moral you are for exposing Goldman when it's the very money and influence you gleaned from that system that gives you the clout to try to cleanse your soul in the Times. You may never work on Wall Street again, but you and your family will be living on the money made from that system. And no amount of op-eds will hide that fact.

UPDATE: Yeah. What Dan Gross said:

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Friday, February 24, 2012

This is how the final emergent of a dismal Republican field regains the White House
Posted by Jill | 5:44 AM
Sane people have been scratching their heads throughout this GOP primary season, looking at the parade of charlatans and lunatics that have been bleating their insane ravings in what seems like 2,987,497,221 debates since the whole mess started and wondering how any of these miscreants could ever have any chance of winning the White House. We've wondered, "How are they going to do it?" With an admittedly glacially-slow recovery starting to take dim hold in the minds of the American people, and with Barack Obama holding significant leads over ALL of the remaining denizens of the Republican Klown Kar, I's natural to wonder how the business community -- the Koch brothers, the less-visible chairmen of other oil interests, and the others that we can lump together in the greed wing of the GOP -- will manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Now we know.

Gas pump prices.

The people around Obama should really have anticipated this. David Axelrod is old enough to remember waiting in line for gasoline in 1973 and 1977. He's old enough to remember skyrocketing gas prices and shortages that become so much a part of American life in the late 1970s that McDonald's was able to capitalize on it and envision gas line-as-party:



The oil shocks of the 1970s made Jimmy Carter a one-term president, for all that he was right about everything he said in the now-infamous "sweater speech":



"Sacrifice." That's a word Americans have never wanted to hear, at least not since World War II. It's funny how sacrifice used to be equated with a kind of patriotism, but in the first decade of the new century we had Dick Cheney responding to calls to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels supplied by the very people who begat the 9/11 hijackers by saying it was unnecessary because ours is a blessed lifestyle. It never ceases to amaze me that forty years later, the very same people who waited in line for gas in their twenties are the ones the news media show at the pump expressing shock at gas prices. But then, this is a country that slapped photographs of Osama Bin Laden in crosshairs on their Hummers, then went out and pumped fifty gallons of Saudi oil-based gasoline into them with absolutely no sense of irony and even less willingness to make the connection.

Commodity markets are difficult for most people to understand. Everything most of us know about commodities speculation we learned from Trading Places:



This is not to say that there is a complete media blackout on the true cause of recent skyrocketing gas prices. Those Americans who still have some grey matter in our crania can put together that the stuff they're hearing on the evening news about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz might have something to do with it. And if we read a bit further, there are a few intrepid news sources talking about speculation being the real culprit. ABC News is one of them:

Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates commodity futures and option trading in the United States, said it’s time to look at home — in addition to overseas — when searching for the reasons why gas prices are on the rise.

“I’m fired up,” Chilton said. “I’m concerned and we have to look after consumers.”

According to Chilton, much of the problem is actually “made in the USA,” created by Wall Street traders who gamble on oil prices.

“There aren’t markets without speculation,” Chilton told ABC News. “It’s the excessive speculation we are concerned about.”

Chilton, who has served as commissioner since 2007, said far too few players control far too much of the market, allowing them to push the price of gas higher and higher. Chilton and the CFTC are attempting to implement caps on the total positions speculators can take when trading in the oil futures markets.

Chilton obtained an energy research report from Goldman Sachs spelling out how much the Wall Street firm estimated speculators had pushed up the real price of oil sold to make gas, due to large bets in the markets.

Using the numbers from in the Goldman Sachs report, combined with current information from the CFTC, Chilton calculated how much speculation is driving up the price at the pump for the average consumer.

He shared calculations with ABC News for the first time.

By Chilton’s calculation, if you drive a car like a Honda Civic, you’re paying $7.30 more than you should every time you fill up — to Wall Street speculators. If your car is a Ford Explorer you’re paying an extra $10.41.

For a Ford F150, he says owners pay an additional $14.56 per fill up -or more than $750 a year.

Now that ought to be a wake-up call to Americans, except that this is from a blog on the ABC news site and I have no idea if it actually made it onto the evening news that low-information voters watch while serving the kids their chicken nuggets and Kraft mac 'n' cheese. But of course facts don't matter when you have a country that wants whoever is president at any given time as some kind of All-Powerful Big Daddy That Will Make the Boogeyman Go Away. George W. Bush told everyone to go shopping and not worry about Osama Bin Laden, and Americans were reassured. And what they want now is for Barack Obama to wave a magic wand and make gas prices drop to a dollar a gallon again. He can't do it any more than Jimmy Carter could make the Middle East turmoil that plagued his presidency go away.

But today there seems to be something far more sinister than world affairs, or even oil speculators, at work. The visibility of Halliburton during the last decade, and the political visibility today of the Koch brothers, with their heavy investment in right-wing Super PACs, gives the men who run the U.S. oil industry a face and shows that their political agenda is exactly the same as that of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: to make Barack Obama a one-term president. It's hard to believe that it's an accident that oil prices are skyrocketing just as the economy has begun to show signs of life. Rick Ungar certainly smells a rat, and so do I.

Yesterday Barack Obama made passing reference to increased oil consumption in China and uncertainty about Iran, but most Americans don't want to hear that. This is a country that has proven itself to no longer have higher brain function, but instead is ruled by the reptilian brain. Over half of Americans already disapprove of his policies on energy as a result of the price run-up at the pump in the last few weeks. Unless he wants to hand the keys over to the likes of Willard Romney or Rick Santorquemada next January 20, he'd better start talking about Wall Street speculators. That is an image that even the worst mouth-frothers in the flyover states can understand.

Update: Also, too.

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Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Everything that's wrong with the shareholder model of corporate money in one article
Posted by Jill | 7:59 PM
The latest about Apple stock:

Apple today reported revenue of $28.27B for the fourth quarter and $6.62B in net profit ($7.05 per diluted share). These numbers compare quite favorably to $20.34B and $4.31B ($4.64 per diluted share) for the same quarter last year.

Gross margins for Apple during Q4 were 40.3 percent.

During the quarter, Apple sold 17.07 million iPhones (21 percent growth year-over-year), 11.12 million iPads (166 percent growth), 4.89 million Mac computers (26 percent growth), and 6.62 million iPods (27 percent decline)

[snip]

Despite the good news coming out Cupertino today, investors weren't too terribly impressed. Analysts were expecting revenue of $29.69B and earnings per share of $7.39. They also expected quarterly iPhones sales to be in the 18 million to 20 million range.

Apple shares are down over $26 in after hours trading.


Wall Street analysts are like the Critical Parent of the Transactional Analysis model developed by Eric Berne in the 1950's: No matter how well you perform, they always want to know why you didn't do better.

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Saturday, January 16, 2010

Saturday Big Blue Smurf Blogging. What They Said.
Posted by Jill | 6:16 AM
Today's honoree: Bustednuckles, for offering Wall Street a path to redemption.

Money quote:
If you have one shred of decency, give a bunch of your ill gotten gains to help someone who bleeds just the same shade of red as you do.
The unimaginable disaster that just completely destroyed a country with no buffer zone for it's inhabitants should trigger a bit of empathy from every one.

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