Threshold Resistance Read Online Free Page A
Author: A. Alfred Taubman
for food. Thatâs when it really hit me just how responsible I was for their well-being. If I screwed up, their childrenâs teeth wouldnât be straight or white, and their mortgages wouldnât be paid. I knew I needed great people to help my business grow, and I deeply appreciated my employeesâ commitment, but the responsibility I felt for them and their families was at times overwhelming.
I still remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I received a phone call at home in the middle of the night from the father of one of our young secretaries. Our employees had all gathered earlier that evening at a restaurant in Detroit for our company Christmas party. Apparently, this young woman, who still lived with her parents, had decided to spend the rest of the evening with one of our not-so-young executives. That was the last company party wehad for many years, and I made sure that everybody had Dick Kughnâs home phone number.
I was pleased with my progress, professionally and personally. Reva and I were married in 1948 and settled in an apartment in Detroit. Our first child, Gayle, was born in 1951, and Robert followed in 1953. William completed our clan in 1958. But I was eager to take on larger building projects, and in 1953, I saw an opportunity. A friend from school, Irving Rose, pointed me in the direction of a troubled project in Flint, Michigan. An out-of-town developer was putting up a large (for the time) group of stores, anchored by a Federalâs department store, but had made a mess of the design and execution. The original developer had designed it to connect to a nonexistent sewer in the street, to cite one example.
At the time, Flint was a growing and prosperous market, with its huge Buick plants. The Taubman Company stepped in and completed the project. And we did something comparatively radical: we moved the stores from the front of the lot to the back, and put the parking in front of the retail stores.
North Flint Plaza was a success and gave us the confidence to plot our own larger-scale developments. In 1957, we completed the forty-store Taylortown Shopping Center in Taylor, Michigan, and in 1959, we started work on our first large mallâthe single-level Arborland, a large center near the University of Michigan campus, which included a Montgomery Ward, Kroger, JCPenney, and S. S. Kresge. We broke ground in early 1961 on the 350,000-square-foot project. Montgomery Ward alone took 120,000 square feet, and the entire project cost about $5 million. These were the first of what would prove to be a very fruitful and profitable line of business for the company.
In the mid-1950s, I also formed a friendship and partnership that would be as fruitful and profitable, economically and personally. Through doing business and living in the Detroit area, I had gottento know Max Fisher, who was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the state and in the country. Max, who had made a fortune in the oil industry, had acquired the Speedway chain of gas stations to distribute fuel from the successful refinery business he had built in Detroit during and after World War II. He asked me to help transform them from discounters into a new merchandising and service concept. I designed an innovative fascia treatment for the stations, using just-introduced outdoor fluorescent lighting (prior to this technological breakthrough, expensive, hard-to-maintain neon tubing was the only exterior option). By creating what was essentially a large plastic light box along the front of the service building, we dressed up the station with a brilliant illuminated sign for Speedway 79, easily read by motorists zooming by. Max eventually hired us to redesign and remodel a very large number of his stations. He became a lifelong friend, mentor, adviser, and partner.
By the end of the 1950s, we had certainly come a long way. The Taubman Company had evolved from a two-person upstart builder backed by $5,000 in
I still remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I received a phone call at home in the middle of the night from the father of one of our young secretaries. Our employees had all gathered earlier that evening at a restaurant in Detroit for our company Christmas party. Apparently, this young woman, who still lived with her parents, had decided to spend the rest of the evening with one of our not-so-young executives. That was the last company party wehad for many years, and I made sure that everybody had Dick Kughnâs home phone number.
I was pleased with my progress, professionally and personally. Reva and I were married in 1948 and settled in an apartment in Detroit. Our first child, Gayle, was born in 1951, and Robert followed in 1953. William completed our clan in 1958. But I was eager to take on larger building projects, and in 1953, I saw an opportunity. A friend from school, Irving Rose, pointed me in the direction of a troubled project in Flint, Michigan. An out-of-town developer was putting up a large (for the time) group of stores, anchored by a Federalâs department store, but had made a mess of the design and execution. The original developer had designed it to connect to a nonexistent sewer in the street, to cite one example.
At the time, Flint was a growing and prosperous market, with its huge Buick plants. The Taubman Company stepped in and completed the project. And we did something comparatively radical: we moved the stores from the front of the lot to the back, and put the parking in front of the retail stores.
North Flint Plaza was a success and gave us the confidence to plot our own larger-scale developments. In 1957, we completed the forty-store Taylortown Shopping Center in Taylor, Michigan, and in 1959, we started work on our first large mallâthe single-level Arborland, a large center near the University of Michigan campus, which included a Montgomery Ward, Kroger, JCPenney, and S. S. Kresge. We broke ground in early 1961 on the 350,000-square-foot project. Montgomery Ward alone took 120,000 square feet, and the entire project cost about $5 million. These were the first of what would prove to be a very fruitful and profitable line of business for the company.
In the mid-1950s, I also formed a friendship and partnership that would be as fruitful and profitable, economically and personally. Through doing business and living in the Detroit area, I had gottento know Max Fisher, who was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the state and in the country. Max, who had made a fortune in the oil industry, had acquired the Speedway chain of gas stations to distribute fuel from the successful refinery business he had built in Detroit during and after World War II. He asked me to help transform them from discounters into a new merchandising and service concept. I designed an innovative fascia treatment for the stations, using just-introduced outdoor fluorescent lighting (prior to this technological breakthrough, expensive, hard-to-maintain neon tubing was the only exterior option). By creating what was essentially a large plastic light box along the front of the service building, we dressed up the station with a brilliant illuminated sign for Speedway 79, easily read by motorists zooming by. Max eventually hired us to redesign and remodel a very large number of his stations. He became a lifelong friend, mentor, adviser, and partner.
By the end of the 1950s, we had certainly come a long way. The Taubman Company had evolved from a two-person upstart builder backed by $5,000 in
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