There are two stores “out in the avenues” as we San Franciscans say, that are interesting.
The first one reminds us that there are no people called Asians. The Lao are
no more like the Chinese than the Chinese are like the Japanese. Yet, there is
a 10,000 square foot Asian grocery store. The store carries tens of thousands of items, of which no more than 2%
are available in Safeway. The food
stock comes from every country in Asia and a wide range of people from the
Pacific and South Pacific shop there. The neighborhood is the safest in San Francisco (except for auto theft).
Adjacent to the Asian grocery store is the Urban
Farmer. A friend of mine started it in
the late 1970s, officially in 1981. The friend is Tom Bressan. Tom now has three thriving stores. I can remember when Tom just had an
idea. Several other people started
similar stores; only Tom made it work.
Which brings me to the main theme of this blog: are we living in the time of the greatest minds in history? Clearly I mean commercial minds.
In just the past few decades we have seen Wal-Mart (Sam
Walton), Microsoft (Bill Gates) and Starbucks (Howard Schultz) become global
companies. GE (Jack Welch) invented the
cumulative conglomerate, Warren Buffett created the perennial high return stock
portfolio, Fidelity (Ed Johnson III) grew mutual funds to gigantic size, IBM (Lou
Gerstner) re-invented itself, Jeff Bezos created a new type of business and Citicorp
(Sandy Weill) invented the diversified global bank.
This is obviously a tiny segment of a much larger and more impressive list. I’m just suggesting that we live in the time of the greatest commercial minds in history. Only J.D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, J.C. Penny and Theodore Vail seem to match our current crop.