The $5 Costco rotisserie chicken stands as a monument against inflation, and a loss leader to keep members coming. Another company story is the quality of leadership, particularly Richard Galanti the CFO, and often the sole company executive on quarterly earnings calls. He deserves a biography and a Wikipedia pageFormer CEO and Cofounder Jim Sinegal deserves a biography even more. I wrote previously about Costco's member obsession. Their model runs so that the membership fee operates as the ...
The last Saturday in February marks a special day for Berkshire Hathaway fans: the release of Warren Buffett's annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Some of the headlines that stem from it will have focused on buyback illiteracy, Berkshire's results, his age, whether he's lost his edge, and what he thinks of "the market." No surprise. He's still bullish on the USA and sees Berkshire as a bet on America (the S&P 500 index gets more of its earnings and sales abroad), all wit ...
When my kids were younger I did a lot of early morning running on a treadmill in our basement. I’d pass the time watching documentaries like Ken Burns' Baseball, or The Civil War. The half-finished innings and chapters left over for the next day were the perfect motivation icing for the next day's run. I was overjoyed last month when Ken Burns appeared as a guest on the podcast Conversations with Tyler. The famed documentary filmmaker still lives in the same New Hampshire town and is a graci ...
For decades the educated, well-traveled, and underpaidThe OG Joe's view have sought refuge in a place with exotic names, cheap and good wine, and easy-to-make orange chicken. For fans, Trader Joe's (TJ's) needs no intro. It's part wine store, part health food store (health food meaning food grown with as few chemicals as possible, natural). A seeming contradiction but those people are basically on the same taste radar, the same cultural attitudes. Joe Coulombe, the talented and personable fou ...
As retirement calls, many business owners look to harvest their life's work and sell the proverbial farm. If that farm is an insurance agency and you're looking for someone to sell to, that partner may be Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. ("Gallagher", Ticker: AJGmarket cap: $34.2B; revenue $7.7B, return on equity: 14%), a global insurance brokerage, risk, consulting and administration services company. Large firms like Gallagher dominate a US market of 1 trillion dollar health insurance budgets. ...
