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Steel's : a forgotten stock market scandal from the 1920s /
This book is about the rise and fall of the retail empire created by Leonard Rambler Steel. Like a Silicon Valley tycoon, he sprang into new ventures with enthusiasm and foresight. At its height, his chain store operation had 75 stores spread over 61 cities in the United States and Canada. He hired...
| Clasificación: | Libro Electrónico |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
Syracuse, New York :
Syracuse University Press,
2013
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| Edición: | First edition. |
| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | This book is about the rise and fall of the retail empire created by Leonard Rambler Steel. Like a Silicon Valley tycoon, he sprang into new ventures with enthusiasm and foresight. At its height, his chain store operation had 75 stores spread over 61 cities in the United States and Canada. He hired women in management and elderly people in his sales force, and anticipated some of the retail models that are used in the twenty-first century by global companies such as Ikea and Wal-Mart. His most remarkable insight was to recognize the marketing potential of the new medium of silent film. In 1921, he created a 3-hour film about his life and company that was screened for free all over North America. The movie, a precursor to the infomercial, attracted prospective buyers for the 5,000 salespeople who sold the company's stock. Almost 60,000 people bought the stock, three times the number who bought into Charles Ponzi's better-known scheme. Eventually, his big ideas became too grandiose, such as developing Niagara Falls into a permanent international exhibition dedicated to commerce and technology, and the investors lost all their money when the company collapsed in 1923 amid fraud charges. With no other published accounts of this scandal, the story told in this book was doomed to be lost forever until the author discovered the document trove that brought it back to life. The remarkable creativity and foresight of the founder makes for a fascinating tale of failure by someone who had what it takes to succeed. The L. R. Steel Company could have been Wal-Mart - but ended up like Enron. |
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| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (xxx, 157 pages) : illustrations, portraits |
| Bibliografía: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-151) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780815652069 0815652062 |