In the world of professional sports “tanking” has become the trendy strategy for a losing team to turn a losing franchise into a contender. In baseball, the Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros both transformed themselves by becoming ultra-awful losers for several years in order to draft potential stars and develop them into the nucleus of a winning team over five years. Many teams try to “tank” and rebuild only to languish for years in the purgatory of sports. The Cleveland Browns and Buffalo Bills of pro football come to mind. The path seems pretty clear in pro sports, though not…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Around the world May 1 is May Day, a holiday celebrated by Labor as a demonstration of its power and determination. In the United States it is another work day and essentially forgotten as is the organized labor movement except by government workers and teachers. The industrial labor movement in America still has its vestiges in the United Auto Workers and Steelworkers and electricians, but it is a withering movement in the small- and medium-sized businesses I deal with. Retail is a wasteland for organized labor. UPS is organized, but FedEx is not. Uber and Lyft are totally nonunion. McDonald’s…
I am in the process of making a lot of changes in my surroundings. The axiom used to be that as you get older it gets harder to change, but I don’t find that to be true. Seeing friends and associates get sick and die makes it easier because I want to sandwich more stuff into my life while I still can. If I have the energy and the money to replace the old appliances in the house and sand the floors and paint the walls I want to do it now. The redo in my house has nothing to…
Francesco Molinari, the Italian professional golfer who has entered the top tier of pros who are factors in every major tournament, led by two strokes going into the final round of the Masters Sunday. I have followed Molinari with more than a casual interest of late because he has used a putter made by a 90-person job shop just down the road from Graff-Pinkert in Tinley Park, Illinois. I met the owner, Bob Bettinardi, at IMTS. We were both resting our bones for a few minutes next to the Universal Robots exhibit, and we talked a bit about CNC mills…
I attended PMTS, the exhibition put on by the Precision Products Association last week, not really to sell screw machines, but to learn and connect. Accomplishing this goal gave me a satisfaction and closure that I’ve never felt before at a show. Here’s the crux of what I learned. This was the happiest crowd I’ve ever seen at an event of this type. The endless mope of the last recession finally has drifted away. Nobody mentioned losing work to China which was a theme for so long. The prevailing vibe was that big companies are finding China a scary place…
I have just completed an indolent weekend of imbibing sports on TV: NCAA basketball winnowing 16 terrific college teams down to the Final Four and the Chicago Cubs opening the season with the Texas Rangers. Just for the added whipped cream I watched the Miami Pro Tennis Tournament that Roger Federer won, the 101st significant tournament victory of his career. I thought about business a bit, responded to emails, ruminated about blog topics, changed my travel plans to the Precision Machining Technology Show in Cleveland this week, and did a rigorous work out, but mostly I relished some superb basketball and…
Just as online shopping has transformed U.S. retail sales, the Internet has also remade the newspaper industry, but in a manner less obvious to most people. The old print newspaper business and revenue model has been seriously broken by young upstarts—young both in age and in technology. In Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, Jill Abramson, a former senior editorial executive at both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, has provided an insider account of an industry fighting for its life. She examines four competitors—the traditional New York Times and Washington Post,…
For many years, I have wavered between being judgmental or agnostic about who I do business with. I felt twinges of discomfort twice this past week. I had a request for a quote on a Wickman multi-spindle screw machine from a customer who, among many other products, makes accessories for AR-15 semi-automatic weapons. He told me business is robust and they have tripled in size in recent years. He could buy a Wickman multi from someone else (it won’t be as good), but it is in my economic interest to sell him one if he will pay my price and meet…
Dear Lloyd – I read all of the issues of Today’s Machining World and really enjoy the insight and information. I’m a 62 year old journeyman tool and die maker who morphed into a scientific instrument maker, designer, manager over the last forty years. In my current position, I am running a CNC department for a 100 year old family business. I’m helping the fourth generation to go another 100 years. The company started as a tool and die shop, moved into manufacturing (almost a captive shop for Western Electric Hawthorne Works), stamping, forming, laser, waterjet, and is now working…
In the machining world, plumbing products are a sweet spot again because even though new home sales are drifting, the rehab/refurb market is thriving. Faucets are fun again. Hot tubs are hot. India is big in plumbing brass, but a lot of its product goes to Asia, Africa, and South America. If you want quality at an affordable price, you buy American. For me, this brings up many memories of Price Pfister. They used to make a million faucets in Los Angeles and had a name for quality in California. That was until they shut down all of the American production…