No. of Recommendations: 8
This year decided to go for the first time to NFM in Omaha. The store is like nothing I have seen anywhere else. Have kept thinking why haven't they expanded to more states. Currently, they have 5 stores. This seems like a high potential business, especially witht he backing of Berkshire in terms of capital if store expansion was the strategy. Some thoughts on this?
Another first was randomly seeing Buffett outside the AGM. I was having dinner on sunday night at a steakhouse and by chance, he was there. I could not say hi because of security, etc but quite exciting. In 10 years it had not happened.
No. of Recommendations: 8
Berkshire Hathaway owns other furniture store companies too, Jordan's Furniture in the New England states with 7 locations, and Star Furniture in Texas with 10 locations. It looks like they are opening a new NFM in Austin Texas in 2026, which is weird because they already have a Star Furniture like 12 miles from the center of Austin.
I think they've taken See's Candy's attempts at expanding to heart, and are cautious about enlarging their businesses just to be bigger. If you own only a candy store company, and have extra money from it, you might build another candy store, and that sounds reasonable. If you're Berkshire, you can build some new powerlines instead. I think Berkshire's businesses only have the backing of Berkshire's capital when a suggested activity is likely to return more than other available opportunities.
