The yellow flag was waved in April and it feels like business has been in neutral for three months. Personally, I’m tired of it. This was supposed to be the big rebound year, but the earthquake and the oil speculators stole it from us for at least a quarter. I like the spigot from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve being turned on. It alerts the oil hoarders that they can’t always play games with commodities like oil and win. What is the “real” value of a barrel of oil? Nobody knows. But $3 gas would be a welcome sight and with…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Randy Lusk is the extremely bright owner of Lusk Quality Machine Products in Palmdale, California, near Los Angeles. We often exchange ideas on the phone about machine values, but Randy is so canny that he usually buys machines for less than I can find them. A few days ago he posed a technical question about machining a long piece of stainless steel on the Precision Machined Products Association (PMPA) list serve. He received 10 well thought out suggestions from other members of the group, but he also receive a kick in the butt from Slavko Grguric, an iconoclast in the…
While many companies lament the latest business burp to rationalize their cautious inertia, Dick Conrow and Rob Marr of C & A Tool Engineering, Inc. in Churubusco, Indiana, just keep on building. Today’s Machining World did a cover story on the firm five years ago, showing a picture of their chalet-style office on the cover. I reached Rob a couple days ago and he caught me up on business. C & A Tool is a big contract shop near Fort Wayne. They bought a 300,000 square foot building last year for expansion and are beginning to fill it up with…
Judge Vaughn Walker is back in the news even though he retired from the Federal Bench in February. Judge Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8 was unconstitutional, which meant that gay marriage was allowed in California because the language of the earlier Proposition 22 had made it legal in the state. An anti-gay rights group had recently argued that Walker should have recused himself from the case because he was in a gay relationship. I had speculated that his would ultimately bubble up because I knew Vaughn was gay. Vaughn and I were close friends during out freshman and sophomore…
I have long been intrigued and perplexed by the ethical question of organ trading. In America buying and selling an organ or tissue from another person is illegal—but we know it’s done. Cadaver bone is bought and sold, cleansed, sliced and diced and machined for orthopedic implants. Steve Jobs of Apple received a liver transplant at a private hospital in Tennessee. Was it donated? We’ll never know. Blood is bought and sold daily. The argument against a legitimate organ market is that rich people will take advantage of poor people because the prime organs will be sold to the high…
The Eric Lefkofsky story absolutely fascinates me. Oh, you’ve never heard of him? You will. When Groupon, the Web coupon business, goes public this summer, this 41-year-old will be worth a cool $4 billion. The remarkable thing about his story is that his success is built on a string of business failures. Eric started his business career after his girlfriend dumped him during his freshman year at the University of Michigan. He was looking to vent his energy and started buying used carpet from trade shows and selling it to college students moving into the dorms. The business took off…
The disappointing numbers coming out of the economic stat providers on unemployment and purchasing manager sentiment confirm what we’ve been seeing since the gasoline run-up and the Japan earthquake—business in the second quarter is decidedly weaker than the first. The Precision Machined Products Association noted the slowdown in their recent survey of members. Graff-Pinkert has seen several orders evaporate because clients in auto-related businesses are waiting for production schedules to stabilize. The recent financial results of AutoNation, the huge dealership consortium out of Fort Lauderdale, indicated that their Japanese car sales fell apart last quarter with Lexus off 60%. Domestics…
I am always looking for events that shed light on trends that can make us some money, and I recently heard about a significant happening in the suburbs of Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Silver Springs Golf Course in Monticello, Minnesota, shut down in 2009. Its two 18-hole courses and 18,000 square foot clubhouse that could hold a party for 400 were on the market for $11.9 million. Over the last couple weeks huge woodchippers ate the trees and Caterpillars murdered the grass. Five-hundred-eighteen acres of fairways greens and sand traps were being prepared for corn and soybean cultivation. Welcome to the…
Today’s Machining World Archives June 2011 Volume 07 Issue 05 By Lloyd Graff I haven’t gone to an old-fashioned open outcry auction at an automotive factory in quite awhile. For sheer drama and boredom the Hilco Industrial four day 7000 lot sale this week was a throwback to the days when men were men and spark plugs were made on screw machines. The sale was at GM’s old Willow Run transmission plant—6 million square feet under one roof—that used to be a farm owned by Henry Ford in Ypsilanti, Michigan, near Ann Arbor. Today the biggest non-government, non-university employer in…
David Einhorn, New York hedge fund mogul, is reportedly buying a minority stake in the New York Mets from New York money mismanagers, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, because the team is hemorrhaging dough and the Bernie Madoff victims’ lawyer is squeezing them for a billion dollars they entrusted to the Ponzi artist. I ask this question: Why would anybody buy a major league baseball team, much less a minority stake in one? The older I get the more I understand that “ownership” of things is ephemeral and usually a losing proposition. I love baseball, always have, but owning a…