The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [299]
In the city for the New York University ceremony, the family took care to keep her from seeing the price of her hotel room, for she had been to New York before and thought anything more than $75 for a hotel room was outrageous.57 She had Louie take her to see Ellis Island and Delancey Street, but getting around the city was a struggle, for she felt cheated by the price of a taxi.58 On the morning of commencement, Mrs. B was “robed” with great pomp and circumstance and received her degree alongside Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the poet Octavio Paz.
Despite the august company of the NYU ceremony, when asked which of the two honorary degrees she preferred, Rose did not hesitate. It was Creighton’s. They had bought carpet from her.
Soon after, Berkshire’s auditors conducted the Nebraska Furniture Mart’s first inventory. The store was worth $85 million. Mrs. B, seized with a severe case of remorse after she had sold it for a total value of $60 million, including the share retained by the family, told Regardie’s magazine, “I wouldn’t go back on my word, but I was surprised…. He never thought a minute [before agreeing to the price], but he studies. I bet you he knew.”59 Buffett, of course, could not have “known,” not literally. But he had certainly known there was a whopping margin of safety in the price.
Nevertheless, he practically considered himself a member of the family by now. When Mrs. B turned ninety, the Furniture Mart organized a huge sale, taking out full-page ads for days in the local paper, as it did every year on her birthday. Buffett would tease her about the date of her birthday sales.
“She measured her birthday by the Jewish calendar, which moved around. I used to tease her about that; it really didn’t fall on the same day every year. But I said that the way she moved it around was whenever she needed a little more business. Her birthday was quite flexible. She’d smile and look at me and say, ‘Well, you don’t understand the Jewish calendar.’”
Within two years, however, this fairy tale of a story turned ugly. The indomitable Mrs. B yelled at her grandsons Ron and Irv in front of the customers, calling them bums. As tough a life as she’d lived, and as hard as she’d had to work, who could know more about the business than she? Gradually—and understandably—“the boys” stopped speaking to her.
Finally, when she was age ninety-five, her grandsons overruled her on a carpet purchase and she exploded. It was the last straw. “I was the boss. They never told me nothing,”60 she said, and quit. She also demanded $96,000 in unused vacation pay on her way out the door.61
But sitting at home alone, she acknowledged, was “awful lonely, not to do nothing. I go nuts.”62 In ominous newspaper interviews she referred to her grandsons as “dummies” and, shockingly, “Nazis.”63 She hinted at solo trips to the North Carolina High Point Market, the furniture industry’s largest trade show. She suddenly arranged to have a warehouse she owned right across the street from the Furniture Mart refurbished. She held a “garage sale” in it, and cleared $18,000 in one day, selling “some of her own things.”64 A few months later, “Mrs. B’s Warehouse” was grossing $3,000 a day before it officially opened.
Asked about the impending battle for customers, she snarled to the local paper, “I’ll give it to them.” When the paucity of parking spaces at her new store was mentioned, she pointed to the Furniture Mart’s lot and said, “Park there…they won’t notice.” Soon she was embroiled in a fight with her grandsons over city parking ordinances. She put up a sign: “Their price $104, our price $80.”65 When Bob Brown on ABC’s 20/20 program asked her about the Furniture Mart, she said, “I would it should go up in smoke. I like they should go down to hell….”66
Some time earlier, Buffett had created a saying. “I would rather wrestle grizzlies,” he said, “than compete with Mrs. B and her progeny.”67 Stuck wrestling grizzlies, Buffett