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Nebraska Furniture Mart

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Re: Nebraska Furniture Mart

#61

Post by tim333 »

609venezia wrote: post #31
hogFeast wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was also notoriously abusive towards staff and her family. That was the reason why her family forced her to retire initially (iirc, and I may be misremembering this, she only has one biological son...the other two married her daughters and they were, perhaps understandably, not keen to carry on after the sale because of the abuse).

Do you have a source for her abuse? A quick search didn’t turn up anything—your comment is the top google result :)

Here's something from http://www.quoteswise.com/rose-blumkin-quotes.html :

>[To Warren Buffett when she had lined up a group of her grandsons and sons-in-law and nephews against a wall and was lecturing them.] See all these guys next to me? If I sell it to you, you can fire them. These people are a bunch of bums, and they are all related to me and I can’t fire them. But you can fire them. They’re bums, bums, bums. [‘She went on like this for an hour, literally. The word ‘bums’ recurred many, many times. Then she dismissed me. I had served my purpose.’ – ###Warren Buffett

The other quotes are quite an interesting read also.

Re: Nebraska Furniture Mart

#63

Post by icebraining »

dymk wrote: post #55
kick wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If t…

> Most stories about politics ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. clearly HN does not follow nor enforce these rules, so why pretend when pick-and-choose anyways? And why lecture people on what is "on topic" when objectively "off topic" stuff makes it to the front page all the time?

Who do you see as "lecturing" here?

Re: Nebraska Furniture Mart

#64

Post by exabrial »

The traffic at the Kansas City location ironically lead to the opening of the Ikea here. Ikea used NFM's gaffs as a playbook to ensure their opening went smooth; everything from choosing location to paying for traffic signal upgrades (and hiring local law enforcement to trigger them manually) was thought out.

Re: Nebraska Furniture Mart

#65

Post by exabrial »

lqet wrote: post #14
c0achmcguirk wrote: post #12

I have no idea why this is on the front page of Hacker News but I'm not hating it. I moved from Omaha to the Denver/Boulder area two years ago and besides the Henry Doorly Zoo, I miss Nebraska Furniture Mart the most. NFM is a great place to buy pretty much anything you want to put in your house. Mrs. B really knew how to make a business work. The only weird thing is how antiquated their computer systems are, it's am…

> It's amazing they are so profitable with 70's era technology running the business. Without knowing any details, I would say that there are people who would argue that this attitude may be one of the reasons they are profitable. Why change a perfectly working system your customer does have no direct interaction with?

It's obviously impossible to be profitable without using serverless javascript lambadas hosted on aws running node on docker with cassandra in a completely polyglot environment. I mean that stack pretty much prints money, unlike the 1970s technology.

Re: Nebraska Furniture Mart

#66

Post by AmVess »

hogFeast wrote: post #8

It is worth checking out the relevant chapter in Alice Schroder's Buffett bio. Amazing story. Iirc, it took her six months just to get out of the USSR, across Russia, through China, then went on a cargo ship. It also covers how she got started which is just as interesting (she got sued for selling too cheap, she can't read, she can't write, etc.). The stores are also unbelievably large. They seem to be 25-50% bigger…

There's a door showroom in Chongqing that's so big you drive through it and look at all the doors on offer.

Yes, you drive through it in your car and look at housing doors of all types.

Re: Nebraska Furniture Mart

#67

Post by emilfihlman »

dymk wrote: post #54
dev_dull wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repairability is one of the defining qualities of “old stuff”

only the "old stuff" that survived. all the other "old stuff" (which is most of it) is in a landfill because it was irreparable.

Of course, as is only natural.

Why change stuff that survived?

Re: Nebraska Furniture Mart

#68

Post by hogFeast »

609venezia wrote: post #31
hogFeast wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was also notoriously abusive towards staff and her family. That was the reason why her family forced her to retire initially (iirc, and I may be misremembering this, she only has one biological son...the other two married her daughters and they were, perhaps understandably, not keen to carry on after the sale because of the abuse).

Do you have a source for her abuse? A quick search didn’t turn up anything—your comment is the top google result :)

As I said somewhere else, you should check out Alice Schroder's chapter on NFM in her Buffett bio for a source.

Re: Nebraska Furniture Mart

#69

Post by hogFeast »

AmVess wrote: post #66
hogFeast wrote: post #8

It is worth checking out the relevant chapter in Alice Schroder's Buffett bio. Amazing story. Iirc, it took her six months just to get out of the USSR, across Russia, through China, then went on a cargo ship. It also covers how she got started which is just as interesting (she got sued for selling too cheap, she can't read, she can't write, etc.). The stores are also unbelievably large. They seem to be 25-50% bigger…

There's a door showroom in Chongqing that's so big you drive through it and look at all the doors on offer. Yes, you drive through it in your car and look at housing doors of all types.

That is really worth a Google. Must require some ventilation. Totally mad.

Re: Nebraska Furniture Mart

#70

Post by whenchamenia »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #15
jfk13 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps that illustrates just how little value we've really added during the last few decades of "improving" business systems...

I derive great value from ordering online and picking up in store, as well as stores that show me inventory and item location.

And yet, theirs can, and does!
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