Alan Fox

I have always lived in Los Angeles, California, with a population of millions.  Yesterday I visited Stevenson, Washington with a population of 1,414.

Daveen and I enjoyed both lunch and dinner in a Mexican restaurant.  At dinner we began chatting with the server, who turned out to be the owner and was also originally from Los Angeles.  She expressed the same concerns I have heard from restaurant owners in L.A.

“My business held up through the pandemic,” she said.  “We do a lot of take-out business, and that continued to do fine.  But in the past few months our orders are way down, and I might have to close.”

Another one of the challenges has been staffing the restaurant.  According to her, the state of Washington has implemented a program that pays the rent and utilities for many of their residents who, as a result, don’t have to work.  Presumably, their subsidized income is not high enough to pay for restaurant food. I have heard similar complaints from restaurant owners in Los Angeles, and some have closed or limited their hours because they aren’t able to hire enough employees.

I founded ACF more than fifty years ago and, just like the restaurant owner, we are also having difficulty in filing vacant staff positions.  Fortunately, we have the option of outsourcing some of that work to other companies.  But that alternative doesn’t exist in Stevenson.

Since our entire ACF investment portfolio is in retail shopping centers, I am always interested in the successes or challenges faced by our tenants.  Every time I drive down Ventura Boulevard, I take note of the vacant retail space.  There is more today than at any time that I can remember.

It’s important, however, to heed the advice given during the Great Depression in the 1930’s by the extraordinary stock market trader Bernard Baruch.  When asked what he expected the stock market to do he replied, “It will fluctuate.”

And whether we are owners, employees, or investors, that is exactly what we can expect in the future.  Things will fluctuate.

That is true whether you live in Los Angeles, or Stevenson, Washington, or any point in between.

Alan

Easter Island is a speck of land in the South Pacific, about 2,500 miles from either Chile or Tahiti.  I’ve visited there four times, but I won’t be going back.  For good reason.

The last time I was there, the owner of our motel charged me for an extra day, and also for an extra dinner.  I argued the point with him, as I normally would when I feel I’m right.

The argument was not going well.  The man was steadfast in his seemingly flawed reasoning that I owed the extra money.  It was not a small amount.

It was then I realized, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.  In other words, I was in a foreign country where I didn’t know either the people or the local rules.  For all I knew the proprietor was also the chief of police who could detain me on Easter Island indefinitely.  And what would I do then?  Call the President of the United States?

I paid the extra money but promised myself I would never return.

You have to choose your battles in life, the fewer the better, and never those you can’t win.

A friend of mine once had a two-hour argument with U.S. Customs.  The result?  He missed his connecting flight and for the next five years, every time he traveled abroad, he was hassled by a U.S. customs official when he returned.  Perhaps there was a note in his file read by every agent he encountered as he passed through customs upon re-entering the country?

Years ago, when I was practicing law, I needed to obtain default judgements every month or two from a specific court clerk in downtown Los Angeles.  I was always very nice to him, and he promptly provided what I needed.  Just as on Easter Island, I did not have a choice of vendor, so I made sure to maintain a good relationship with the clerk.

We’ve probably all noticed over the years that in dealing with people, especially a stranger, it’s better to start out nice.  You can always shift to a hardline later, but that’s a one-way street.  It’s difficult to switch from nasty to nice.  As they say, you only have one chance to make a favorable first impression.

I have many places yet to visit or revisit.  Alas, Easter Island is not one of them.

Alan

I’ve recently been reading The Empire of Pain, The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.  This family owned and marketed Oxycontin,   even after its harmful and addictive properties were well known.  The Sackler family was also philanthropic. They donated millions upon millions of dollars to artistic, academic, medical and cultural programs, and their name was on many prestigious art galleries throughout the world.

The book offers one interesting reason, among others, for their apparent generosity.  A quest for immortality.  While they might have been creating an Empire of Pain, they wanted to be known for having done extraordinarily good for the world.

Sorry, Sacklers.  There is no such thing as immortality here on earth.  Though it seems your legacy might be a little different than you had planned, five hundred years from now I doubt anyone will know your story.  And even if they did, it would make no difference to you at all.

We should have no illusions here.  Who were your ancestors and where were they living in 1623 (the year Shakespeare’s First Folio was published – seven years after his death)?  With the help of genealogy, you might trace your family tree back several centuries, but even that wouldn’t reveal anything about who they really were.  How they earned a living.  What they were really like.

Even Shakespeare, who left a legacy of more than thirty plays and hundreds of sonnets and has been called the greatest writer in the English language is not immortal.  We all know his name, most of us have read at least one of his plays and can recite one or two lines from memory (“To be or not to be, that is the question…”).  But even if school children throughout the world pledged allegiance to Shakespeare every morning, what good would it do him?  It’s not as if today he is enjoying his fame.

This leads me to an inescapable conclusion – enjoy each moment.  And if aiming for immortality is important to you, then by all means go for it.  But I suggest you employ acts of actual kindness.  If you change one other person’s life for the better, you have created an enduring legacy.

Recently I read one author’s suggestions for a happy life.  His fifth and final idea was to enjoy each moment as it comes. I remind myself of that regularly.

It seems to me that if we help others and savor each moment, our lives will be both happy and meaningful.

Alan