The day before this column was due, I suffered a serious hand injury which made it impossible to write on a keyboard. I gave up on writing with dictation software years ago, as it is the connection with the keyboard that allows me to do my best work. With my editor’s permission, I dusted off an educational column I wrote…
Read MoreBy Pierre G. Villere I can tell you that of all the things I have aspired to in life, being a lumber dealer has never been one of them. Goodness, the fluctuations in prices is far worse than dispensing gasoline at a convenience store, and now thousands of lumber dealers have seen their standing inventory significantly devalued because of the…
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Okay, class, what have you learned from my years of teaching and lecturing around our industry about sentiment? That’s right: sentiment is self-fulfilling. It is remarkably interesting to watch what has occurred since March, when inflation continued to be reported as being stubbornly persistent, and the Fed, like me, changed their view that the rise in prices was not transient…
Read Moreby Pierre G. Villere As we were going to press this month, all eyes in the human resources world were on the continuing labor shortages; a news story that went viral reported that a Burger King restaurant in Latrobe, Pa. had hung out a banner offering a $1,500 signing bonus, which was later clarified when management explained it was for…
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by Pierre G. Villere We all know there have repeated efforts for decades now to increase the federal gas tax, which has stood at 18.4 cents since 1993, almost 30 years without an increase.
Read Moreby Pierre G. Villere Those of us who are older and have had multi-decade careers have seen this play out before in Washington, D.C.: The opposing party wins the White House, and a majority in both houses of Congress. While the 50-50 split in the Senate is not technically a majority, the vice president holds the power to break a…
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by Pierre G. Villere As we all know, terms like “disruptive technologies” and “disruptive innovation” have moved into the mainstream business lexicon, and mark the distinction between the way it has always been done, and the opportunity for change as a result of new technologies or processes.
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by Pierre G. Villere A couple of months ago, I wrote about my most recent crystal ball prognostications, and expected the decade of the 2020s to resemble the 1920s, a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity coming out of World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. I dubbed this economic expectation for the 2020s the “Roaring Twenties…
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by Pierre G. Villere In one of the scenes in the iconic motion picture Casablanca, Captain Renault attempts to arrest the protagonist, Victor Lazlo, and in one the most famous lines in movie history, Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick Blaine pulls a gun on Renault and utters the famous words “Not so fast, Louie”… .
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by Pierre G. Villere Last month, I wrote about the lasting effects of Covid-19 long after a vaccine and herd immunity allow us to climb out of our world of lockdowns, quarantines, masking, and social distancing. I keep hearing about the “new normal,” and thought it would be interesting to review how the world emerged from the last great pandemic,…
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