Plenty to post, but the documentary "Wal-Mart: High Cost of a Low Price" is the most prominent thing on my mind. The whole Wal-Mart scenario is just a pathetic bunch of fallacies, selfish premises, and misleading contradictions; in 2004 employees contributed $5 million to a personal rainy-day fund for employees having hard times, while the Waltons (net worth $102 billion) pitched in $6,000. Yip. That's the equivalent of a teacher giving less than a quarter..of a penny. CEO Leo Scott boasts that by sharing a New York hotel room with the CFO over $200 was saved by shareholders. Yip. The same Leo Scott that made $27 million. It's not that they are cheap, it's that they are fundamentally greedy. The whole lot of them.
Other than that it was a finance day. I worked on a problem set, then a case, then with a partner on the case, then with a team on the problem set, and then assembled and submitted the finished problem set. In between all that I had an initial meeting about the Art on View website that Abby and I are going to put together to highlight Ross's art collection. It's funny to work with a creative mind on things (or any mind other than my own, for that matter) because you see things differently from start to finish. Be it colors and contrasts or objectives and tie-ins, there is a whole order of bright ideas that need an opposite-brained person to see the light of day.
Monday, November 14, 2005