Sublime

The people in the stores were long-tenured, partly because most of our full-timers had risen from the ranks of the part-timers; and partly because of the slow growth of the number of stores, so there weren’t scads of promotion opportunities.

People often ask me, how many stores did we have at such-and-such a time? It’s the wrong question to ask. What’s important is dollar sales. For example, from 1980 to 1988, we increased the number of stores by 50 percent, but sales were up 340 percent.

His first rule for new ideas was to always think outside the box, but always consider our customers and employees.

During the next twelve years under Mac the Knife, we not only radically changed the composition of what we sold; we totally centralized the distribution into our own system, ending all direct store deliveries by vendors!

We brought it to Los Angeles, had it bottled (Pilgrim Joe’s label), and we didn’t just break the price—we destroyed the price!

how we built a successful business on high wages.

Thus, at the time, I was willing to make only 13 percent on a $20 bottle of champagne, because that was a $2.60 profit. For a $2.00 item, however, I wanted to make a much greater percentage. Actually, we persistently got rid of anything that sold for less than a dollar.

the Byzantine management atmosphere at first Rexall and then Hughes Aircraft had convinced me that the only real security lies in having your own business, and this left-hander was well ahead of the curve on that one. Also, I was convinced that I was on a holy mission in preserving a company owned significantly by its employees. My