U-Haul is a weird company. It rents moving equipment and self-storage space but also sells annuities. It boasts a ubiquitous brand synonymous with do-it-yourself moving that until recently was buried beneath the non-descript banner of its parent company, Amerco. It runs the 4th largest self-storage operation in the US by square footage but is rarely […]

(this should be read as a companion piece to the Dollar General post from a few weeks ago). Like Dollar General and Wal-Mart, Dollar Tree traces its origins to variety stores in the Southeast. In 1963 K.R. Perry, a barber and Ben Franklin variety store franchisee, opened the K&K Five and Ten in Ward’s Corner, […]

In Scottsville, Kentucky at the dawn of World War 2 the market for “selling the good stuff to rich folks” was already taken, so J. L. Turner and Sons sold “the cheap stuff to the poor folks” instead. For the first 16 years of its life, the budding enterprise trafficked in close-out merchandise, first as […]

Before exploring the competitive concerns that have sent shares cratering nearly 60%, it’s worth reflecting on what it is that got people excited about Adyen in the first place. In a typical online transaction, a shopper’s credit card details are picked up and encrypted by a gateway before being routed to the appropriate merchant acquirer. […]

No analysis of the North American railroad industry would be complete without a discussion of Hunter Harrison as no single person has had a bigger impact on the operating performance of Class 1 railroads over the last 25 years. A lifelong railroader who began his career oiling railcars in the early ‘60s when he was […]

Part 1 of this series offers a historical survey of how today’s Class 1 rails came to be. Parts 2 and 3 start at the ground level with the very basics of freight carriage, build up to an understanding of how an industry that had destroyed over most of its 200-year history managed to turn […]

In the gaseous hot ball of 19th century US rail activity roils the primordial elements of American industry: a technology startling in its potential yet exaggerated in its promise by visionaries and hucksters, transformed into shape by private enterprise with government aid and later controlled and extended by the ambitious and vicious. The atrophying influence […]

If all you knew about Dun & Bradstreet was that it sold mission critical data on more than 520mn companies, that all this data was linked to its widely referenced proprietary identifier, that 96% of its customers retained every year and were mostly monetized through high margin subscriptions, you might be tempted to comp to […]