Was talking to Tony the elder the other day about stuff business related. His wish if he were young and could do it all over again would be to open a second store. There's a lot to be said for that. Economies of scale start to kick in. It also creates a local inventory buffer so you can send people to your own store to get what they want instead of to the competition. If it's strategically located, it can be a back door into obtaining proprietary brands by being far enough away from competitors - and then bringing those brands back to the mother ship. Then I thought about his words - if he could do it over again. In fact that's pretty much what he did the first time around, back in the late fifties. Put a second store in Los Altos. It was a brilliant move. It was in Los Altos where the Packard kids took music lessons and Jerry Garcia bought strings when he was a starving student.

Flip back to the present. No, I'm not planning to open another store any time soon, if ever. The jury's still out on whether this one will be able to sustain the mortgage. But it's intriguing.