To: Bill Harmond who wrote (16968 ) 9/12/1998 8:54:00 AM From: llamaphlegm Respond to of 164684
William: SBUX is an instructive example of another wildly overpriced stock (yes been bearish on that one since the upper 50s and still am). Built into the stock price is massive supermarket sales, domination of ice cream sales and all sorts of ridiculous assumptions about new stores and same store sales growth. And they made money. Well, the market is starting to reprice reality into the company again. A good company? yes. Good coffee (for mass consumption, yes). But they too run into real world distribution, growth and competitive problems. Don't believe me? Go to some of their stores and see if you can find the good service ones and the ones manned (or womanned) by pre-pubescent, nose-ringed surly kids or folks just released from 12 step programs dedicated to those who can't do anything right the first time (let alone quickly). Tight labor markets limit everyone's growth. By the way, SBUX is also afflicted with the "quick, let's panic and start selling all sorts of other garbage and pretend that this will justify our stock price" malady. Jazz cds? This tiazzi drink cr-p? Please. Oh, and please stop making spurious arguments about the growth of amzn and its online share. Go back and actually read the 10Q (really, it doesn't hurt) and the comments from Bezos and Covey from the last 1/4's conference. Bezos estimated a total of 10% of all book sales to be on line in the foreseeable future. That ain't gonna come close to justifying the stock price (better hope those other products sell like hotcakes). Oh, he also predicts slowing book sales growth and tells us that the music on line sales industry is highly competitive with even thinner margins than books (How does one get thinner than losing $7.15 for each book you sell? Ask Heard on the Street column in this past wed. WSJ) LP