many many IPOs came out of the dot com boom and then bomb - every company I used to talk to in the years 2000-2004 - the vast majority of which were R&D stage tech companies, so no products, no profit, would be sure to boast about their pending IPO.

the revolution of the internet, to my memory, played a huge role in the rampant establishment of publically traded companies. VC firms invested in them in droves with the idea that they'd cash in on the IPOs and shortly after finding it didn't happen, withdrew all funding and moved on- so poof, no more IPOs...

How many publicly traded companies do you think there were before the dotcom boom?

I don't know at all - I started working in my company in February or March of 2000- so right around the time things got really exciting in high tech companies- not just internet services being provided in place of brick and mortar establishments, but the infrastructure that would support it - telecommunications, systems integration, all the dirty work behind the scenes - so there were a ton of high tech industries that were affected (and created) in response to that boom -
hell, my own company went public itself in 1999 because it was just branching out to providing online services (they used to produce hard copy volumes of business directories, and moved onto providing CD-ROM versions of the same, then quickly ran to everything provided online- software as a service- which is essentially what we do still, although much evolved from back then) - anyway - they went public because of a perceived shift in where the profits could be made, were successful or a bit, and then nearly collapsed (and my entire department was shut down in 2004) - once investors calmed down and began to look at the businesses they were investing in in accordance with what they were offering as products rather than the fact of them offering the products/services via some high tech mechanism.(the internet).

So that's not an answer... what I can speak to with some amount of professional certainty about public companies before and after the dot com boom is I think very large companies go public and stay public (my company is not public anymore, and has been acquired numerous times as example of smaller companies no longer being public) - because it's more economically beneficial to the company to be public - and the decline of the economy has made investors pay much closer attention to "proven monetary value" than "anticipated monetary value"

Aldi is a small scale supermarket chain based I believe in Germany that offers very low prices (and fairly good quality for the most part) by using almost entirely store branded merchandise, not accepting credit cards and making people insert a quarter to use a shopping cart (which is returned upon using said cart I'm told, I've never used a cart)

For budget shopping it's much better than Walmart because it's smaller (though like WM, they could stand to hire another cashier or 50) and the credit thing is annoying to me since I could just pay my own fee.

That said, I like the idea of using subtle pressure to get people to change habits that hurt the store, like returning carts to the corral instead of them drifting through the parking lot and getting lost, or using their own bags, and or not paying the fee to the credit card companies among other things. For me, the selection is not large enough to do my weekly shopping, but the fresh produce is not bad, and most of the things I bought were very good quality for the money.

At the very least, it's much smaller than Walmart, with less people and I like that. It's tough to find the right balance of selection/quality vs rock bottom price.


I'm sure it's counter to most MBA programs, but I'm not really sure expansive growth and pulling in as much capital as possible is always the best thing.

Does every store have to be in every suburb to be considered a success?

In regards to shopping carts left behind higgeldy-piggeldy, I feel that we should all feel free to use moral suasion to combat this behavior. Even when shopping cart stalls are provided in every lane in a parking lot people routinely shove a cart until the front wheels are on the curb and then call it good. Sadly, I am not a confrontational person so I limit it to dirty looks and quiet comments to my significant other. I just hope that those better than me have the courage to loudly and publicly denounce those who inconvenience others to save walking 20 feet. If it all works out, we might just save a few cents at check out and validate the business model of our preferred grocery store.

I'm a lazy piece of shit when it comes to returning shopping carts to their rightful spot.

That depressed the hell out of me.

I want to live in Hawaii.

Who would have thought that Hawaii would be the gayest state? Must be all those men in speedos with their baskets full.

The wife of a guy I work with is a store manager and said that there are rumors floating around that at the beginning of the year Walmart, at least in the "right to work" states, will give all hourly full time employees the option of either going part time or not having a job so that they won't have to foot the bill for insurance.

Do you have to bring the cart back to a specific area to get the quarter back? If so, they dont have to pay an employee to go gathering the carts.

Figured that you (and others) might appreciate these longish articles on the subject:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ ... story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... -business/

This is a bit of a fluff piece, but still, I Costco.

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/michael- ... 25421.html

This picture made the rounds quickly:

Heh.

I get that Walmart could pay people more, but allowing associates to help each other on company property should not be the action that reopens the discussion.

The cost of Thanksgiving dinner is too damn high!