I was a VERY successful Kool-Aid stand operator when I was a kid in Montreal. It was great: on the sidewalk in front of our home, on hot muggy summer days, I set up a small table, covered with a couple of absorbent towels, a few glasses and a large pitcher of Kool-Aid, with beckoning cool ice cubes bobbing on top of my sparkling strawberry secret recipe (a little extra sugar) Kool Aid concoction .
I made a fortune … sometimes $5 a day! Not bad … for Kool Aid that I sold for 5 cents a glass … plus tips.
I lived the good life …. able to buy baseball cards, yo-yos, Fudgicles and a Davie Crocket hat … all the trappings of a westside kid’s life in Montreal.
Of course, my parents lost their shirts in my venture. They had supplied the table, the towels, the start-up Kool-Aid (then I’d buy refills), the glasses … including washing them afterwards … but received no cut from the profits. I was a great capitalist!
Which brings me to CanWest.
When I retired in 2006, CanWest shares traded around $16 each: today, 35 cents .. if they can get it! And bancruptcy is knocking at the door.
I have only a limited understanding of the highly-complicated intricacies of major corporate financing, expansions, acquisitions, dispositions, leveraging and consolidations.
But I always felt, as a CanWest Global employee, the Asper boys were living pretty good lives, while most of us below them were expected to bear the major burden of their incredibly rapidly-growing business empire. “Doing more with less” became the hallmark of the operation, while the boys, and their highly paid executive advisors, it seemed, plowed ahead buying and acquiring and expanding … all the while, still spending very well at the top on themselves.
If they had only come to me and asked for advice from my Kool Aid stand experience!!
You see, I too had foolishly gone the expansion route: after doing so well with my basic Kool-Aid operation …. I wanted more, more, more. So I brought in bags of potato chips and packages of “Mae West”s … the most delicious chocolate-covered, creme filled white hockey-puck shaped cakes money could buy!
They flopped! In hindsight (a favorite corporate tactic!), for several reasons: in Montreal’s hot sun, the chocolate cakes tended to melt and became just a gooey mess; I also had to set the price of both the “Mae West”s and the potato chips above that of the store where I bought them (the grocery chain was not as nice to me as my parents!); and, frankly, I often ate more than I sold!!
You can’t do that, Lenny and David! Take it from me … I learned the hard way … you can’t expand faster than you can manage, your corporate creditors won’t be as sympathetic as your parents, and you can’t spend more than you take in.
I knew that. Izzy knew that. Too bad, the boys apparently didn’t … or forgot! And now they are paying the real price for what seems to me being extreme corporate “chazzers” (Yiddish for greedy people.)
It really is a shame and a tragedy for not only the Aspers, but their father’s legacy and all the thousands of people who work(ed) at the company.
But once all the dust settles from CanWest’s imminent implosion, I will still be happy to help the boys out: to set up a Kool Aid stand … so they too can learn what “doing more with less” is REALLY like.
Harv Oberfeld
5 responses so far ↓
1 claudia // Feb 27, 2009 at 5:13 am
Great story Harvey, I really enjoyed the read. My daughter and the neigbour kids also did the ‘stand’, here on SS Island. Homemade choc chip cookies and lemonade set up on the route to Ruckle Park, catching all those hot and thirsty cyclists. They could not buy it fast enough! They would haul in $60 a day easy. I like to think of this as sorta yin and yang capitalism. Both sides were happy with the arrangements. Nowadays, greed gets in the way and unrealistic decisions are made to justify your existance.
With regard to CanWest, I’m sure that soon you will be hearing that it is all the fault of the front line workers. They must get paid to much and have to many benefits for what they do.
2 BC Mary // Feb 28, 2009 at 3:17 am
I have enormous respect for journalism as a profession. An honest, fair-minded news media is an essential part of managing our affairs.
But CanWest has been an abominable disappointment in the quality of its news, its self-serving biases, and its contempt for the public it ought to have served.
It’s humiliating for a province to discover that — worse than a lousy news media — it may now have no media at all. That, too, is a CanWest legacy: they wanted everything and now everything in Big Media has crashed.
Very hard to feel sorry for them. Did CanWest feel sorry for the people they hoodwinked with their relentless promotion of Premier Gamble, its denunciations of Premier Clark, its many self-serving errors of commission and omission? No, I bet the Aspers don’t get it even yet.
CanWest been an especial blight this beautiful province, where it had a nearly absolute lock on people, on elections, and on the kind of news they published. God, that pig farm … !
I just wish I could see an up-and-coming new newspaper or TV station prepared to serve B.C. fairly in future. But this wasteland, too, is the CanWest legacy. Let’s hope it isn’t long before a bright new publisher tries again.
3 DMJ // Feb 28, 2009 at 9:41 pm
CanWest/Global is so bad, that I stopped reading papers and almost stopped watching the TV news.
This is terrible for this country, but for channel 11 news (I believe your old spot) has gotten so Olympic mad, that it has become so so boring and channel 9 doesn’t do much better.
The Seattle news on TV is hokier but somehow more interesting.
If CanWest/Global fades off into the Sunset, it isn’t soon enough.
4 Leshka // Mar 16, 2009 at 12:32 am
Amazing post about actaul news, thanmx =)
5 Play Slots Kid // Oct 10, 2011 at 9:36 am
I am touched by this story . And from personal experience can agree with you . Sometimes “Big Guys” simply forget how it was on the beginning and for sure spend more then they actually have or earn . Maybe you should employ them on your stand to remind them .
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