The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [295]
She was hard at it six and a half days a week. “It’s mine habit,” she said. In her mind, the showroom was her home. Her daughter, Cynthia Schneider, who decorated her mother’s house, had arranged the furniture “just as you would find in the store” because “it’s the only way we could be sure she would be comfortable.”33 The lampshades remained covered in plastic. Price tags dangled from some of the furniture. “I only use the kitchen and bedroom,” said Mrs. B. “I can’t wait until it gets daylight, so I can get back to the business.”
On Sunday afternoons—the only time all week she wasn’t at the store—she drove around town with Louie. “I go shop the windows,” she said. “I plan an attack on the shopkeepers, thinking, ‘How much hell can I give them?’”34 All her work, she said, was inspired by her “diamond mother,” who had run a grocery in Russia. She never forgot waking in the night to find her mother doing laundry and baking bread at three a.m. “She would carry a hundred pounds of flour twenty blocks for three cents’ profit,” she said. “It broke my heart.”35 And so, Rose’s soft spot was refugees and immigrants. She sometimes put them to work in the bookkeeping department, telling them, “You don’t need English to count.”36
In 1982, the Omaha World-Herald interviewed her. She said that over the years the family had rejected several offers to buy her company. “Who could afford to buy a store this big?” One of the offers, she told Louie, was Berkshire’s. Buffett had talked to her a few years earlier and she’d told him: “You’ll try to steal it.”37
A year later, Buffett heard that the Blumkins were negotiating with a company in Hamburg, Germany, that operated the largest furniture store in the world, a model similar to theirs. The Blumkins were selling! “You don’t have to be very smart to figure out it’s a good idea to go into partnership with Mrs. B,” Buffett said.38
Maybe this time they were serious. Twenty-some-odd years before, on yet another occasion, Rose had summoned Buffett to her store downtown, indicating that she was thinking of selling. He really wanted to buy the Furniture Mart for Berkshire. He had walked in to find a short, squat woman lecturing a group of men lined up against the wall: her grandsons and sons-in-law and nephews. She turned to Buffett. “‘See all these guys next to me?’ she said. ‘If I sell it to you, you can fire them. These people are a bunch of bums, and they are all related to me and I can’t fire them. But you can fire them. They’re bums, bums, bums.’
“She went on like this for an hour, literally. The word ‘bums’ recurred many, many times.” The relatives, long used to Rose, stood, impassive. “Then she dismissed me. I had served my purpose.”
It was too bad; he would have liked to buy the store.39
“She thought the only one who was worth anything was Louie, and he was perfect.” When she was pleased with Louie, as she usually was, she told him, “Oy, oy, oy, oy, it’s beautiful, you did such a good job.”40
If the Blumkins had talked themselves into selling, now was the time. Mrs. B had had two knee replacements, ceding most of the day-to-day operations to Louie. But she was still running the carpet department. “Something about carpet fascinated