Sunday, January 17, 2016

The Pull of The Glass Industry

Whenever someone new joins our industry I usually tell them that they are here for life.  For whatever reason, glass and glazing has an amazing pull to keep folks around, albeit in different jobs for different companies, but still same industry. Now there’s been some exceptions, incredible people like Tony Clark and Scott Surma were able to pull themselves away from this world and do extremely well in other industry realms.  But in the end, the pull here is real.  Why do I bring this up?  Because an excellent blog postby Glass Magazine’s Bethany Stough was dead on.  If you are not in this industry you care about the new or remodeled buildings differently.  Basically when you are an outsider and that new store or doctor’s office opens, you are happy about the new options or the convenience.  But when you are in this industry, you are focused on what glass did they choose, what metal system, who supplied it, who sourced it and more.  Only those of us in the industry can understand the feeling and NEED to bend down in front of total strangers to look for a logo on tempered glass or a spacer marking on an insulated storefront.  So Bethany, great piece, welcome back (and CONGRATS!) and I’m pretty sure you are here in this industry for the long run!

Elsewhere…

--  The industry lost an absolute icon last week with the passing of Ed Berkowitz.  Ed was a great person, class act and excellent businessman.   His impact on the industry will always be felt because he positively influenced so many and his son Arthur has carried on the class approach that the Berkowitz family has had for generations.  I count myself as fortunate to have been able to chat with Ed on a couple of occasions.  He truly will be missed.  Continued thoughts and condolences to his family, friends, and company.

--  Pretty brutal week on the stock market and fears of a recession are out there.  The initial feeling for many is this is part of a “correction” and things will settle.  If you attended the Glazing Executive Forum at GlassBuild America this past fall you would’ve heard economist Jeff Dietrich talk about the coming corrective actions to the market.  So at this point I am going with that… and I am making every effort to not look at the stock market numbers.

--  At this point I am assuming no one in this industry won Powerball?  For my fellow road warriors I felt like I had a moment almost as good as winning Powerball this week.  I had an empty seat next to me on a long flight.  That never happens… 

--  And speaking of flying, I was not aware that there’s now a new “class” of seats being sold.  Welcome to “last class” which will be a step below coach and really no frills.  So the experience of flight is already difficult, tiring, frustrating etc… and now we’ve somehow found a way to make it worse.  Yikes.  However I did find one article that made some points about how this could be a good thing… so there’s that.

LINKS of the WEEK

Did you know Powerball once had a rigging scandal?

Love this list of banned words for 2016.  I need to check and make sure I don’t use these….

I am NOT a fan of cruises.. but this is good news for those of you who are…

VIDEO of the WEEK

The great David Bowie passed away this week.  Conan O’Brien did a fantastic and funny tribute to him.  What a cool sense of humor Bowie had as well.





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