Bickel Blog

I was talking with my running store partner, Dave Welsh, this evening about the fact that business so far this year is up - and seems to be getting better each month as compared to last year. We were down Jan. 09 to Jan. 08. By March we were up over 20%. So far in April we are up even more! I am wondering if running shoes might be a way for people to partake in inconspicuous consumption? As I have discussed before, the vast majority of the population that is still earning what they have been earning the past several years. But it is not cool to shop and spend excessively. Hummers are out, Saks Fifth Avenue sales are down 25%+, but buying a nice pair of running shoes is not viewed as excessive. And maybe people want to get more natural - driving less, taking more walks and trying to get in shape by doing some running. I have no idea if this theory is right, but we sure hope it keeps up!

It looks like Mark Little is moving into the CTO role at the JBoss division in Red Hat as Sacha Labourey departs . This is a great move. Mark is very smart, has deep experience in enterprise level software, is very collaborative and has a quiet drive for success. Plus Mark comes from Newcastle , England - which I think is a pretty close translation from Neuchatel , Switzerland where Sacha is from. I first met Mark when Rich Friedman and I went to Newcastle to try to convince Arjuna Labs to join forces with Bluestone about 10 years ago. Mark was the genius CTO who was one of the key guys on an amazing team that had developed a Java Transacti on Processing technology. Mark was one of the leading, recognized industry experts in this field. He was the one who drilled us with questions across the board - technology, people, processes, customers, culture. Mark had an understanding far beyond the details of the code and into the whole complex set of people, customers, partners and ma...

Sacha Labourey announced today that he is moving on from Red Hat - JBoss. There were a ton of great people who helped make JBoss successful. Of course Marc Fleury, the smart and dynamic founder. Scott Stark who made JBoss a real product with excellent stability. Fantastic technical project leads like Bill Burke, Adrian Brock, Gavin King, Bela Ban, Ivelin Ivanov, Rich Friedman and so many more. And great business people like Tom Leonard, Rob Bearden, Joe McGonnell, Brad Murdoch, Shaun Connolly and of course the original JBoss Sales-Guy Ben Sabrin. But I would say Sacha Labourey had as much impact as anyone over the years at JBoss. Sacha started like all early people with JBoss – as a contributor. He wrote the first implementation of clustering with JBoss. That capability is what moved JBoss from a simple developer tool and low end app server to something that could seriously compete with WebLogic and WebSphere. That early work established his technical smarts, but it also was the...

I just returned from a great trip to see Allison since she is doing a semester in Toulouse, France her Junior year. It is really cool to see your daughter grow up so well. We did a long weekend adventure to Marrakech. Allison has done a lot of studies about the French colonization of Northern Africa and some of the modern implications of that with immigrants to France. She was also supposed to be taking a course in Arabic, but alas the French are on strike so that class has met rarely. We stayed in a Marrakech Riad - Riad Dar Najat. This is a picture of Allison relaxing on their open lounge area on the top floor. Getting a good Riad is pretty important. Riad's are the equivalent of American Bed & Breakfasts. The streets in Marrakech are lined with walls typically without many windows. It is kind of hot and dirty. You open the door to the Riad and it is like an oasis! Open courtyard to the sky and typically three floors with a couple of bedrooms on each floor and an ...

I walked into a friends office yesterday and he called me "Mr. Gloom" as he was watching the Dow fall 250 points and hit levels last seen in 1997. So I thought I would pass along some good news... The running store's sales for this February vs. last February are up over 20%. I'm not sure if this is a leading indicator or just a freak of weather or what. The same is true at our two sister stores in South Jersey. I was also talking with another friend this weekend, and he made an interesting observation. He said that while there were people losing their jobs, most people had not been affected in their income level. Meaning that for over 90% of the population, nothing has changed except their 401K statements. The fact that their house is worth less does not really impact their day-to-day "Income Statement". We speculated that people were saving a bit more than they did and building up a cushion, but in the long run this was kind of healthy. Anyway, some...

I have had this thought in my mind that the economy seems to be contracting about 10%. I was reminded of this as I awoke to my radio (KYW) news that the Pennsylvania State Revenue was 11% below expectations. They reported Sales Tax was off 7%, Personal Income Tax was off 13%, corporate tax was off 18%, inheritance tax was off 10% and real estate transfer tax was off 35%. This matches the performance at the running store in January - we were down 10% excluding our recently opened website - RunningCompanyShoes.com . It kind of makes me think that maybe we got 10% ahead of ourselves the past decade. People took out too much credit, and basically extended the economy more than it should have naturally grown. Now that we take the 10% step back, it is very painful. It is painful for the 10% of the workforce that is getting laid off. It is very painful for the states and other government organizations to be coming up 10% short of their revenue projections. And of course businesses g...

To follow up on my post from a while ago, Galbraith sited 5 key reasons for the 1929 crash and following depression: 1. The bad distribution of income. 2. The bad corporate structure. 3. The bad banking structure. 4. The dubious state of the foreign balance. 5. The poor state of economic intelligence. To compare this to today: 1. Bad income distribution. 1929 - Top 5% received about 33% of all personal income. 1929 - Top 1% held 44% of all wealth. 2000 - Top 1% received about 20% of all personal income. 2004 - Top 1% held 34% of all wealth. Here is a picture of the real income gains between 1979 and 2005 by percentage. It is clear that the top income groups are gaining ground faster than lower income groups - creating an income distribution that approaches 1929. 2. Bad corporate structure. In the 1929 era there had been a large rise in a "vast structure of holding companies and investment trusts... In particular the dividends from the operating companies paid the interest on t...