The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [292]
For seven days she rode the train until, at the border town of Zabaykai’sk, a Russian guard stopped her before she could enter China. She told the man she was buying leather for the army and promised him a bottle of slivovitz on her return. Either naive or lenient, he let her through the border. She rode through Harbin, Manchuria, to Tientsin, China, on another train. By then Rose had journeyed over nine thousand miles across almost the entire continent of Asia.5 From Tientsin she used her small stock of money to take a boat to Japan, with stops at Hiroshima and Kobe along the way, until she finally arrived in Yokohama. There she waited for another two weeks until finding the Ava Maru, a cargo boat carrying peanuts that gave her steerage passage to the United States. As the Ava Maru crossed the Pacific for six leisurely weeks on its way to Seattle, “I never saw so many peanuts,” she said later. “I thought I’d never get here.”6 She had carried dry black bread on board but was too sick for most of the journey to eat.7
Landing in Seattle on the Jewish holiday Purim after almost three months of travel with a face swollen from illness, Rose was met at the dock by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, fed a kosher dinner, and given a hotel room. “When I came to this country,” she said, “I thought I am the luckiest one in the whole world.”8 The HIAS put a tag around her neck with her name and “Ft. Dodge, Iowa,” where her husband had settled and was working as a junk peddler. They sent her on a train through Minneapolis to Fort Dodge, where the American Red Cross met her and reunited her with Isadore. Rose got pregnant right away and gave birth to a daughter, Frances. She didn’t know a word of English.
Two years later, she still spoke hardly any English. Feeling isolated, the Blumkins decided they had to live in a place where Rose could converse in Russian and Yiddish, so they moved to Omaha, a town filled with 32,000 immigrants drawn by the railroads and packinghouses.9
Isadore rented a pawnshop. “You never hear of a pawnshop going broke,” he said.10 Rose stayed home and had three more children, Louis, Cynthia, and Sylvia. Sending fifty dollars at a time back to Russia, she brought ten of her relatives to America. Unlike her husband, she still didn’t speak much English. “I was too dumb,” she said. “They couldn’t drill it in me with a nail. The kids teached me. When my Frances started kindergarten, she says, ‘I’ll show you what an apple is, what a tablecloth, what a knife.’”11 But the store struggled and the family almost did go broke during the Depression. Then Rose took charge. I know what to do, undersell the big shots, she told her husband. “You buy an item for three dollars and sell it for $3.30. Ten percent over cost!” When the old-fashioned suits they carried weren’t selling, Rose handed out ten thousand circulars all over Omaha, saying their store would outfit a man for five dollars from head to toe—underwear, suit, tie, shoes, and straw hat. They took in $800 in a single day, more than they had made the entire year before.12 The store branched into jewelry, used fur coats, and furniture. Then Rose drove the department stores crazy when she started underselling them on new fur coats on consignment.13 But she had a philosophy: “It’s better to have them hate you than to feel sorry for you.”
Soon customers started asking her for more furniture. At first she accompanied them to wholesalers and bought for them at ten percent over her cost. She noticed that, unlike pawnbroking, selling furniture was a “happy business,” so in 1937