Enjoyed reading Karen Blumenthal’s piece in the WSJ yesterday:
In this decade, we have had more than our share of big-time booms and busts: the tech bubble, the housing bubble and, this year, what Warren Buffett has called the Treasury bubble.
For some years now, I have been a student of these extreme financial cycles. In the 1980s, I witnessed firsthand the Texas real-estate bubble and covered companies crushed in the junk-bond bubble. I wrote a book about the crash of 1929. And to my terrific shame, at the top of an inflated market, I once paid $50 for a $5 Beanie Baby named Peace.
In studying what drives bubbles, I’ve come to believe that they follow fairly regular patterns. If we could learn to recognize these, we might be more astute in reacting and adjusting our own behavior. And even if we can’t see beyond the excitement they generate, there are underlying lessons for investors.
The lesson: sell when it’s on the way up.
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That’s right, “Glazed and Confused.” It’s a type of donut made and sold by Psycho Donuts in Campbell, California. They also sell Cereal Killer, Mood Swing and Headbanger (formerly known as Massive Head Trauma) donut varieties.
Love it. Great concept and very creative — an they’ve only been in business for six months. All in a down economy. I think they’ve got a chance at franchising, too. Nice T-shirts, too.
Mental health advocates find their marketing insensitive, and they’ve got a point. Chief Psycho Jordan Zweigoron agrees and he’s changing things around:
Sooner-than-later changes to Psycho Donuts could be the beginning of the end of a months-long controversy between the shop and the mental health community.
Psycho Donuts owner Jordan Zweigoron announced he’d be making some changes to the shop after taking sole ownership at the end of July, but gave few details about exactly what he would do and when he would do it. But last week, Psycho Donuts’ transition began with a revamped Web site that, among other things, includes links to several mental health advocacy groups and changes to product names.
The names of two of the more controversial doughnuts, “Bipolar” and “Massive Head Trauma,” are now known as “Mood Swing” and “Headbanger,” respectively. There’s also now a “Jekyll and Hyde” doughnut.
“It was becoming really something of a polarizing issue,” Zweigoron said of the controversy that began when the shop opened in March. “We had to do some soul searching, and it came down to two things: We had no intention of offending anyone, but we also didn’t see ourselves as a mascot for free speech. Some supporters wanted us to adopt that model, but what we really decided was we wanted to be the most unusual doughnut shop on the planet.
“A lot of [the changes] were things that I planned to do all along,” Zweigoron added. “It wasn’t about giving into demands, but more about in order to be the most unusual doughnut shop in the land, you have to keep innovating, and that’s my intention.”
Watch him defend himself on Fox Business Channel last week. When I visit the South Bay area, expect me to visit this establishment.
Here’s a typical day at Pshycho Donuts, seen in a video from May, 2009…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAHVOn5y8eE]
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