Who's Taking Care Of Business These Days?

In search of the quirky founders doing actual things

Readers: From tomorrow until the end of Sunday, as I do every full week before Christmas, I’ll be publishing some longer essays and a really fun edition of “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?”. I’ll also be offering a discount to new subscribers (newly signing up or upgrading from free). Please consider that and check out next week’s pieces!

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Often in the course of writing pieces here about old stores or companies, I’ll come across anecdotes about a quirky, charismatic, enterprising businessman who started it all. Howard Deering Johnson (Howard Johnson’s); Harland Sanders (KFC); Charles Lazarus (Toys ‘R’ Us); the lesser known Herbert and Sidney Hubschman (Two Guys discount department stores, an early big-box general-merchandise chain); Sol Price, the founder of Price Club (merged with Costco), which was named after him, not after a wink at low prices.

What distinguishes this broad category of businesspeople, to me, is that they’re not corporate-suit CEO types, i.e. managers with a distant, abstract, and financialized view of their companies. Nor are they “founders” in the Silicon Valley startup sense, with some gimmick that may or may not have any real merit, and a self-conscious goal of getting bought by someone else. They’re not venture-capital-backed companies like the Wonder food hall chain (which bills itself as a bunch of restaurants in one, but is basically a simple kitchen reheating lots of frozen food from a central commissary, like a high-concept, eclectic Howard Johnson’s). And they’re not single-store proprietors overseeing family businesses.

Their companies made it big, and evolved into stodgy corporate chains eventually, but in their early life and expansion period, they retained some of the quirky, human character of their founders.

There’s something about that that feels a bit like a lost world. What companies, doing physical things (small-scale manufacturing, retail, food service) resemble these old companies? What people out there are doing this kind of highly successful but still personalized entrepreneurship?