No. of Recommendations: 7
One thing that struck me in Bloomstran's interview last month, and that had made the rounds here, was that he praised DG management, but then proceeded to refer specifically to the Board ("it is so good"), including Chairman Mike Calbert, without praising or even mentioning then CEO Owens.
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[01:14:15] Chris Bloomstran: But I'm making, I've just made Dollar General a very big position here in the last month and a half, because it's now among the cheapest companies in the portfolio versus what was one of the most fully valued companies in the portfolio two years ago. Under the hood, you don't necessarily see it if you simply look at a list of Semper Augustus holdings, but it's the value that's added by trimming the deer and buying the cheap at the margin that I think delivers an enormous amount of value over time.
[01:14:43] Chris Bloomstran: And that's. very much predicated on price. I mean, this has nothing to do with, and I believe the issues that Dollar General is grappling with now operationally and on the regulatory front and on a little bit of changing distribution as they've changed the footprint of the stores and they're making their base store model.
[01:15:00] Chris Bloomstran: A thousand square foot bigger, 1, 100 square foot bigger than the typical 7, 400. [b] I think this management team is so good. Their board is so good. Mike Calbert, the chairman, I've got to know, he's phenomenal. These are very good retailers. They'll fix the current issues. [/b] And again, some of these issues are simply the flip side of the business being pulled forward, being too good for a year and a half period of time.
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Transcript available here:
https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/richer-wiser-h...Calbert bio available here:
https://investor.dollargeneral.com/websites/dollar...Make of it what you will, I guess. But I suspect that emphasis wasn't accidental.
The negative here, of course, is that some combination of the Board & Vasos signed off on Owens as CEO, and they would have known him well (as former COO). So if Owen wasn't the answer, it's unclear why they didn't know it in November '22.
