About 30 years ago, my wife, Risa, was on the commuter train headed downtown for an appointment with her gynecologist. Suddenly the conductor was scurrying into the car. He shouted, “Anybody know CPR? A baby isn’t breathing.” Risa was trained in CPR and loves babies. She jumped to her feet and followed him to the screaming mother, who happened to be African American. Everyone else sat still as statues. The baby was covered in blood. She weighed 5 lb and was three weeks old. A young guy was holding her in one hand and doing chest compressions with two fingers.…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Picture this situation. $1.3 billion in clean, desirable, unused inventory sitting in your warehouses. Your predecessor recently got fired for bad business judgment after several successful years. Your brand is in the sewer and still sinking. There are plenty of buyers who would love the inventory because they could almost instantly sell it for a big profit, but if you sell it to them you might have a dozen lawsuits and get the ax too. The inventory we are discussing is Adidas’s leftover Kanye West brand Yeezy shoes. Tomorrow at Adidas’s annual stockholder meeting in Germany, one of the company’s…
I followed a Tesla Model S driving home last night. Attractive blue sedan, even in the Chicago gloom. I have not personally seen any other makes of electric vehicles other than a rivian pickup, which looked like it had never been driven on the streets of Chi-town. I know Ford has sold some Mustangs, and GM sold some Bolts, which they discontinued. I see no electric BMWs or Mercedes or Audis or Chinese built electric varieties in my town. Tesla owns the American market for electrics, but their behavior says they are running scared. Two price cuts in the last…
I commemorated the 26th anniversary of my dad’s death this past weekend. I lit the traditional Yahrzeit candle, which lasts 24 hours, and said the ancient prayer in Hebrew called the Kaddish. This time it was particularly significant because it also meant that I had lived longer than him. I know that such footnotes of survival are stupid in the rational world in which I walk on the treadmill, trade machine tools, and write weekly blogs. Yet it looms large to me. Oddly enough, I also had my semi-annual appointment with my cardiologist yesterday, who listened to my heart, and…
I am haunted on this day. I could not focus on work, health, family, even baseball. My blueberries I ate for breakfast even evoked thoughts of blue forearm tattoos with numbers. The light blue sweatpants I wore for a workout on my treadmill brought up visions of blue striped prisoner’s pajamas. Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, have sleeted into my memory. I’ve spent hours watching and listening to trailers of Holocaust films today. *** It’s odd. My parents never discussed the Holocaust with me. It was not a school topic. I was naive, and I didn’t read…
It’s April. Holy Cow! Call me a silly romantic, but I love this month. Spring. Birds are chirping. Magnolias are blooming, even in Chicago. It’s a joyful cacophony. And there is SPORTS. It is the one great thing on TV if cooking and home improvement bore you. First, there was the NCAA Basketball tournament. My favorites were knocked out early. Florida Atlantic from Boca Raton in the Final Four? Are you crazy? Last second shots. Unknown players and coaches. I loved it. Now the NBA playoffs start. After a thousand games, we get to watch the best players in the…
Gedaly and Erita and their son Igor were friends of our family in the 1990s. We met them soon after they left Odessa, Ukraine, which was controlled by Russia at the time. We helped Gedaly, an engineer, find a job. In the late 1970s, like Gedaly and Erita, Ella and Mikhail Gershkovich immigrated to the US from the Soviet Union, along with thousands of other Jews escaping Russian tyranny. They joined the Refuseniks who hated Russian oppression and anti-Semitism, taking advantage of the short thaw between the US and Russia to flee. Ella got out when she was 22 using…
Fifteen years ago, I bought a magnificent office chair made especially for me out of sycamore wood. I had seen this chair at an artisan show in Evanston and was immediately stunned by its beauty. I asked the maker if he could build one for me. He gave me the option of a few different woods, and I chose sycamore because I had never seen a sycamore office chair. The price was absurdly expensive, but my wife and I had been acquiring unique art pieces for our home, and I knew this chair would be something to cherish in my…
Is the National Acme screw machine today the accordion of machining? Are shops staking their future on the Acme the polka bands of manufacturing? As sad as I am to admit it, I am close to conceding that at least the 6-spindle Acmes have become hard for a used machinery dealer to turn into money. The reasons are many, and certainly there are exceptions to this observation. 1) You can’t find operators to replace the thousands of retiring setup people and tenders of the cam operated screw machines. An Acme makes money if you can keep it running. In today’s…
The malaise of American manufacturing is the shortage of skilled workers. Every few days, I hear the familiar lament, “I just can’t find good people.” If this is the epidemic of the machining industry in this country, we are long overdue to find the cure. I am both a participant and an observer in this area. Graff-Pinkert has a small staff of factory workers involved in cleaning, painting, and refurbishing primarily screw machines. Our approach to the skills shortage is no panacea for a big machining company, but it is a practical one for us. “Pay people what the larger…
