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?…
Author: Lloyd Graff
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…
The Men’s NCAA basketball tournament begins this week, an extravaganza of hoopla, gambling, and basketball. There are 68 teams, but only a few have a real chance of winning it. The eventual winner will likely come from one of the four No. 1 seeded teams in their regions. I don’t bet on sports. Machine tools are my game, but I love basketball and I find the four highest ranked teams and their coaches especially provocative this year. The No. 1 seed overall in the tournament is Gonzaga. If you do not follow college basketball, you probably have never even heard…
Amazon buys Central Steel and Wire. That’s an odd couple. Not really. What Jeff Bezos wants is the 70 acres of land on the southwest side of Chicago near the old stock yards. No bundles of half inch 12L14 bars in with the bananas for the moment. The Central Steel and Wire Company and its real estate in Chicago was sold to Ryerson Steel in 2018. The firm was an odd duck because it had no debt. It was 56% owned by the James Lowenstine Trust, which was dedicated to using 1,200 acres of natural beauty in Northern Wisconsin as…
Are schools that much different than factories? At this moment in America, virtually every factory is open and many are producing full out. Production is rising nicely. Confidence levels are high. The parking lots are full. Some steel may be a short delay and truckers seem flummoxed, but on the whole, business is jumping and the stock market is bouncing up and down off record highs. Yet in many places, kids are still on Zoom if they own computers, and teachers unions and administrators are growling at each other. Parents are reaching their boiling point as they see their kids’…
Yesterday, I started my workday by returning a phone call to customer in Italy as soon as I finished my home workout. I had read their email to try to distract myself while doing wall squats. Later I spoke with people in Czech Republic, Germany, California, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New York, and emailed others in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Albania, and probably other places. Most of the people were making parts or peddling iron like myself. Customers often ask me how Graff-Pinkert’s used machinery business is doing, and they ask me how I think the manufacturing economy is doing. After…
I spent several hours working at the Graff-Pinkert office today for the first time since last April. I am beginning the process of coming out of my fear induced hibernation, three weeks after my first COVID-19 vaccine shot. The statistics say I have 80% immunity after one Moderna vaccine hit. I sort of trust the number, but not enough to do without the mask, which is my constant annoyance when I leave my home. I hate the COVID necessitated hibernation. At my age, with a heart attack and heart surgery in my past, I am still COVID’s emotional captive. I…
(The comments section on our website is live again so please give me your thoughts.) My wife, Risa, will celebrate a big birthday next week, and I do not know what to give her. I have considered the usual presents–jewelry, clothes, a trip. None seem right. This brings back a conversation that I had with my father a couple of years after my mother had died. We often talked about business, and he told me many stories about his family and his youth but very little about his relationship with his wife. A few years before he died, about five…
Rosalind Brewer took the helm at Walgreens this week, becoming one of only a few African American woman CEOs to ever lead a large American corporation. She had been #2 at Starbucks before being recruited by Walgreens. I wasn’t surprised to see a black woman get a top job with a company like Walgreens. It would have been more shocking if a black woman’s small machining firm applied for membership in the Precision Machined Products Association (PMPA), an organization I belong to as a technical member. This is not a putdown of the PMPA, which I am happy to be…
Can you give me a good reason to write about the machining business with the Super Bowl approaching? Tom Brady, the greatest NFL quarterback ever, against Patrick Mahomes II, who may become the greatest quarterback ever. Yet the life-changing business decision both guys had to make before they turned 21 was whether they wanted to play Major League Baseball or pursue football. Patrick Mahomes, son of a Major League pitcher with the same name, grew up around the game. His dad played for Minnesota, Detroit, even my Chicago Cubs over an 11-year Major League career. Young Patrick was recruited by…