Responding to this week’s FaceTime about the impact on jobs, MNB reader Rich Heiland wrote:
Interesting. A question for anyone over 40 today: Could you have had the career you have had if you were coming out of college, trade school, entering the workforce today?
It is a very good question, one that I have asked myself. My somewhat traditional path, which started with newspapers, certainly doesn’t exist anymore.
We had a piece the other day about Kroger’s planned strategies and tactics for 2026, which prompted one MNB reader to write:
This subject struck a cord with me. I am personally a huge fan of Kroger, especially its great people.
Let’s look at what Rodney left for Kroger to deal with. Rodney might have been a financial genius and the CEO, but was not a leader of people.
A great company that grew leaders for 150 years, he left it with no replacement options. All merchants that made the core business grow were eliminated or left the company. Kroger has talented people today, that no one is mentoring. The Albertsons bust, the street knew it wasn’t going to work a year before it fell apart. Ocado, another bust that cost Kroger billions in capital and an exit clause. Rodney exiting under a cloud scandal, sad for him and Kroger.
Add it up, how many groceries (at grocery margins)does this great company need to sell, to cover billions in miss managed decisions!
True. I didn’t even mention the fact that Kroger appears not to have had a clear succession plan, so when it lost its CEO, there was nobody in the pipeline ready to move into the position. Or, nobody with the trust of the board, which now is saying it will hire the next CEO from outside the company.
(By the way, I’ve heard some interesting names come up this week. I’ve been told by two of them that they’re not on the list … and I won’t mention them here since they both have other C-suite jobs. But I am intrigued.)
Reacting to this week’s story about Instacart (and some of its retailers) being accused of dynamic pricing, one MNB reader wrote:
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and were looking to rent a storage unit. I logged onto Public Storage’s site, and I was looking at rates at a specific local site. I told her the rate, so she pulled it up on her phone – it was more expensive. I pulled it up on a third device in the house, and it was more expensive yet. Clearly they were upping the price, thinking there was increased demand. It definitely left a bad taste in my mouth, and we ultimately rented from another company; not entirely because of the surge pricing, but it was a factor.
I can imagine.
And finally … last week I took note of the passing of playwright Tom Stoppard, and I quoted one of my favorite passage from his “The Real Thing,” my favorite Stoppard play:
“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”
I wrote that “in a world where precision in language isn’t seen as important and where intellect is suspect, Tom Stoppard’s words and plays and perspective all deserve respect, and to be remembered.”
An MNB reader wrote:
I love words and reading and one of my favorite relevant quotes is by David Sedaris:
“Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.”
Nothing like the warmth of a good book, especially at this time of year, when often they go well with the warmth of a good fire and maybe a couple of fingers of bourbon.
But I digress.
The post Your Views A Question For The Ages appeared first on MNB.
View Original Article
