The Ford F-150 pickup trucks, with an average selling price $40,000, are sitting unfinished in assembly plant parking lots. For lack of computer chips, they cannot be driven or sold. Ford will lose at least $2.5 billion in sales this year. Most of it will never be recaptured. Ford and most of the car companies are victims of being slaves to the philosophy of “lean.” Their unwavering belief that their computers and data analysts can predict usage and dictate the ordering of components to wring out the last nickel of profit in order to raise the price of the stock…
Author: Lloyd Graff
May of 2021, after over 50 years of treasure hunting in the machinery business, I am still making a living by searching for overlooked items to find diamonds covered in cutting oil. Some of these machines we might have actually sold their current owners. It makes me think back to a blog I wrote in 2018 about six de Kooning paintings found by a man named David Killen in a New Jersey storage locker. I decided to check up on what happened to the paintings and see if they sold for much money. Here is the original blog, followed by…
It is finally a moment to look back on the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020 and think about the changes in America it has hastened. Many of them would have happened over time but were dramatically sped up by sickness and recovery. **** First, healthcare. The astonishing development of the mRNA vaccines to quickly spur immunity with minimal side effects will go down as one of the greatest advances in medicine in a hundred years. The Turkish husband and wife team in Germany and the Moderna scientists in America had both been working on their ideas for more than a decade…
FYI: If you have ended up on this blog post after clicking the link for the “My Quest for Serendipity” blog on the email blast, click here to the go the proper post. Growing up, I never really “got” Mother’s Day. My mother never did either. The holiday was a big deal, but not for her. It was always about my grandmother, my father’s mother, Ethel Graff, who I think my mother hated. She cast a pall over our family because my dad, a strong, powerful and loving man, was manipulated by her for as long as…
President Joe Biden speaks to Congress after his first 100 days in office tonight. Washington and the media will listen as he intones a profoundly left-wing agenda. The Congress is closely divided, a 6 vote margin in the House, 50-50 in the Senate. The Democrats are hoping for court packing of the Supreme Court to 13 and getting Senators from the District of Columbia. Currently 6 House seats are vacant, awaiting interim elections. The left-wing media is cheering and the Republican strategists are delighting as Biden tilts strongly to the left in his rhetoric and policies, almost ensuring (in my…
My machinery sales company, Graff-Pinkert, is looking for at least one more person to work in our factory. I let two people go during the pandemic because of lack of business, and we just lost a skilled screw machine rebuilder who had worked for us as a gig employee four days a week. The pace of business today is hectic, with more action than we can readily handle, so I am looking for one or two people to join us. How do you find good people who fit into your organization? Networking is my first choice. Talk to your people…
These are a few questions on my mind. I think you get smarter by asking questions, not showing off how much you know. *** 1) Does CBD oil work for you? I have experimented with it after friends told me it worked wonders for them. Here’s what I have found. It helps with the arthritic pain in my thumb and index finger of my left hand. It isn’t miraculous, but it is useful. My sore knees and shoulder don’t seem to improve from it. How do you use it? Do you have a brand that is superior, or is it…
Noah challenged me yesterday as he often does. He said to me, “Dad, what three things have you learned in the last week?” The question forced me to assess what thoughts have had an impact on me, something I seldom do unless I am writing a daily diary. This week I’ve learned about resilience. *** I have been corresponding with a casual friend who used to live in my neighborhood. She and her husband, a doctor, moved to Buffalo for a medical position more than a decade ago. He was struck down by a near fatal heart attack a month…
If you’re looking for poverty and violent crime, Bessemer, in the great state of Alabama, is your town. It was also Amazon’s pick for a huge distribution facility with 6,000 workers, which opened exactly one year ago. Today the results might be in for a landmark union organizing effort and vote at the spanking new facility, built in the former coal mining, limestone, and steel-making town of 27,000, just outside of Birmingham. Is the Tide coming back for unionism in America, with President Biden rooting for the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Workers Union and Bernie Sanders making an appearance?…
A question that has troubled me for many years is if I fit into the supply chain of destruction. I struggled with this following the Purdue Pharma controversy over its magnificent painkiller for cancer patients and surgery survivors, OxyContin. I took this wonder drug in its time-released form after my knee replacement. It worked beautifully for controlling my hurt, although it had a side effect of constipation. I understood that it was not a drug I wanted to take for more than three days unless I was in total misery because of fear of becoming dependent. I stopped taking it…