The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [294]
But even though the Furniture Mart was selling carpet, furniture sales were depressed due to the war; Rose still couldn’t pay her suppliers. Finally a friendly Omaha banker, Wade Martin, asked her what was wrong. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said, “I can’t eat the merchandise.”24 He loaned her $50,000 for ninety days, but Rose couldn’t sleep worrying about how she was going to pay it back. She hit upon the idea of renting the Omaha City Auditorium and cramming it with sofas and dinettes and coffee tables and TV sets. Master merchandisers, she and Louie took out an ad in the paper that was strictly truthful, yet played on wartime scarcity.
This is It! The Sale of Sales! Shortages? Malarky! We can’t eat ’em! We must sell ’em! We’ve been shipped so much merchandise this past 60 days, we have no warehouse room. Yes, we’re overloaded, and how! We can’t eat ’em and usually couldn’t sell as much in six months. So we’ve staged the largest sale ever of its type ever held in this area…45,000 square feet filled with the most unheard of savings of famous brand merchandise.
It drew as many people as if the circus had come to town.25 The Furniture Mart sold a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of furniture in three days. Omaha now knew that Rose Blumkin and the Furniture Mart meant discount furniture, and “From that day, I never owed anybody a penny,” she said.26
That same year, Isadore died of a heart attack. Rose and Louie kept on going. Gradually, “Mrs. B” was becoming a name that everybody knew in Omaha. People came into the store at every stage of their lives: when they got married, when they bought their first house, when they had a baby, when they got a big promotion. The Blumkins bought in huge quantities, cut expenses to the bone, and sold at ten percent above their cost. When a tornado tore the roof off their huge new West Side suburban store in 1975, she and Louie moved everything to their remaining downtown store without hesitation. “If you have the lowest price, they will find you at the bottom of a river,” she said. They did. When a fire burned down the store, she gave the firefighters free TV sets.27
“Everything Mrs. B knew how to do, she would do fast. She didn’t hesitate and there was no second-guessing. She’d buy five thousand tables or sign a thirty-year lease or buy real estate or hire people. There was no looking back. She just swung. You got about two inches outside the perimeter of her circle of competence, she didn’t even want to talk to you about it. She knew exactly what she was good at, and she had no desire to kid herself about those things.”
By the early 1980s, Rose and Louie Blumkin had built the largest furniture store in North America. Its three acres sold over $100 million of furniture a year under one roof, ten times the volume of stores of similar size.28 From then on, sales grew every single year, in good economies or bad, whether Omaha grew or shrank.29 The prosperous, established home furnishing retailers in Omaha who had been her competitors when she started had vanished. Other retailers came into the city and tried to compete with the Mart. Rose cased their showrooms, she and Louie created discount campaigns, and they broke them financially and drove them away. The Mart captured half the business in the metropolitan area—more than Sears, Montgomery Ward, Target, and all the other furniture and appliance retailers combined. Customers began to arrive from Iowa, Kansas, and the Dakotas.
“She grew her own town. Her retailing circle just kept spreading out farther and farther, and her parking lot was full of cars from a hundred or more miles away.”30
Rose became known as Mrs. B, even to her family. She awoke at five a.m., ate only fruits and vegetables,