I love it when CEOs do what they say they will.
From today’s NY Times -
“We hope to do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs, Starbucks did to theirs, Costco did to theirs and Lowe’s-Home Depot did to their industry. And I think if we’ve done our job, five years from now you’re not going to call us a bank.”
[emphasis added] link
— Kerry K. Killinger, chief executive of Washington Mutual, 2003
Well, Kerry Killinger with the oh-so-appropriate last name, you have certainly done your job.
Let’s look at these exemplars of industrial leadership…
WalMart has single-handedly accelerated (measurably) Chinese ownership of the U.S. and has destroyed the economy in hundreds of towns across the country. It has wiped out local businesses, and tied the unskilled population to their low prices, sub-standard wages, and a nearly complete lack of health care options.
CostCo is trying to do the same, although they are more effective at portraying themselves as a little less predatory, which is of course a complete fiction.
Both companies are performing well financially, but their business model ends up doing us far more damage than good. To paraphrase the gay cowboy, “I wish I knew how we could quit them.” (Disclosure: if I was still in the suburbs, I’d probably still buy car tires and other stuff like that from them, because I don’t know how to quit them.)
Home Depot – a great brand turned to trash by the ubiquitous Nardelli, who left HD with a $210-million package for his astonishing work:
wheeeee!
And Starbucks, home of the original $4 cup of burned coffee. We don’t know what Jim Donald’s severance package was, and as major CEOs go, he was on the low end of the earnings scale, at $1-million per year. But you know that, even with plummeting stock prices, they still manage to give the top boys (and they are all boys) stock deals that make them amazing amounts of generally undisclosed money.
These are stock charts you’d expect to see in a Dilbert comic strip. The pointy-haired boss lives, and apparently lives very well.
WW
28 December 2008
