The Annual Meeting was very enjoyable. I was pleasantly surprised by this morning's announcement of two additiional locations. The sites sound like great candidates. The Burbank site in particular is in a very high profile location, near the Media Center Mall and Ikea. It is a place where not only guests but perhaps investors will see it. In addition, I was glad to see that the West Covina site is only 25 minutes from Brea yet has been determined to be a different service area than Brea. I had been thinking that BJ's could actually be FAIRLY close together and not interfere. Who would ever have thought there could be so many McDonald's and Starbucks? The density will also reinforce to potential investors that BJ's is becoming a force in the Southern CA restaurant scene. It was also mentioned at the meeting that they are very focused on accelerating the rate of new openings and plan at least 6 and as many as 10-12 next year if the perfect locations and conditions can be found and arranged. Managements pickiness iwth respect to sites remains one of their greatest talents.
375000 warrants have been repurchased by BJs, and more may be repurchased soon. They are not chasing any price.
No extraordinary charges are expected 3rd quarter so the earings will be 'pure'. There will be significant development costs 4th quarter. I am hoping they can be very explicit about that in the 4th quarter report so that even an accounting dummy will know what the earnings WOULD have been without the development costs.
I was talking to some fellow shareholders and we brainstormed about what else could be done to help the company. We decided it might be helpful to change the name of the company to be more consistent with the BJs brand, such as BJ's Pizza or BJ's Brewhouse. The new stock symbol could be BJBJ. I am tired of explaining why the company is called Chicago Pizza, and there are so many restaurants called Chicago Pizza everyone at first thinks they know what the company is but don't. And face it, BJBJ--who in their right mind would pass up buying a stock with a cool symbol like that? We mentioned it to Jerry--we'll see what happens. In the short term, finishing the lease negotiations on the new spots MIGHT be more important.
I ran into a Merrill Lynch broker in the parking lot afterwards. He asked me how long I had been a shareholder, and I said I thought about 2 years. He said, gee, it has been pretty boring, hasn't it. I commented that perhaps if you were only watching the stock price and not the fundamentals of the company. Well, he was a broker, after all. Probably ate a ton of free pizza, too. Anyway, most stocks are either undervalued or overvalued--few are fairly valued at any given time. And the pendulum usually swings well past equilibrium once it gets going. Just my opinion. |
