The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [40]
Ernest sat at a desk on the mezzanine and glared down at the clerks. Behind his back, the employees called him Old Man Ernie. “He didn’t do a damn thing. He just gave orders,” says Warren. “I mean, he was king. He could see everything. And if a customer walked in who wasn’t waited on like that…” Snap of the fingers and woe to the clerks. He believed in “work, work, plenty of work.” Ernest felt so responsible for making sure that no one in his charge had foolish notions about there being any free lunch in this world that he had once made a lowly stock boy bring two pennies to work to pay his Social Security tax in cash. This handover had been accompanied by a half-hour lecture on the evils of socialism, so that said stock boy would fully understand how that devil Roosevelt and the tweedy, pipe-smoking Ivy League professors he had brought into the government were ruining the country.20
The only time Ernest left the mezzanine was the minute he saw an important woman drive up with her chauffeur. He would tear down the stairs, grab an order slip, and wait on her himself, showing her the new “alligator pears”—avocados—just flown in from Hawaii and handing peppermint sticks to her children.21 In the face of all this attention to rank, when her brother-in-law Fred once stopped waiting on Leila in order to attend to another customer, she stalked out in a huff and never shopped at the store again.22 Howard bought the groceries from then on.
Warren now felt like one of these clerks, hustling around the store under Old Man Ernie’s thumb. Working in his grandfather’s store, he came as close to being a slave as he ever would be in his life.
“He had me do a lot of little lesser jobs. Sometimes I was on the floor. Sometimes he had me counting wartime rationing stamps—sugar stamps, coffee stamps, sitting up on the mezzanine with him. And sometimes I was hiding where he couldn’t see me.
“The worst job was when he hired me and my friend John Pescal to shovel snow. We had this huge snowstorm, a foot of superwet snow. We had to shovel out the whole bank of snow, in front where the customers parked and in the alleyway behind the store, in the loading dock, and by the garage where we had the six trucks.
“We worked at this for about five hours—shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, shoveling. Eventually, we couldn’t even straighten our hands. And then we went to my grandfather. He said, ‘Well, how much should I pay you boys? A dime’s too little and a dollar’s too much!’
“I’ll never forget—John and I looked at each other….”
That worked out to—at most—twenty cents an hour for shoveling snow.
“Oh no! This was the amount we were supposed to split. That was my grandfather….”
Well, a Buffett was a Buffett, but Warren had learned a valuable lesson: Know what the deal is in advance.23
Ernest had two other Buffett traits: an impulsive streak with women and an obsession with perfection. He had entered into two short-lived marriages after Henrietta died, once coming back from a vacation in California newly wed to a woman he had just met. His perfectionism, however, expressed itself at work. Buffett & Son was a direct descendant of the oldest grocery store in Omaha and Ernest’s demanding ways were all in pursuit of an ideal vision of service to his customers. He felt certain the discount national chain stores that were encroaching on the neighborhoods were a fad that would disappear because they could never provide a comparable level of service. Sometime during this period, he wrote confidently to one of his relatives: “The day of the chain store is over.”24
When Buffett & Son ran out of bread, rather than disappoint his customers, Ernest