Better for (Almost) Everyone
For the first time since obtaining a driver’s license at age 17, my driveway hosts no cars, continuing an unburdening which began seven years ago when I sold my paint stores in the Bronx, seeking roads less encumbered.
My first drive was a 1976 Pontiac Sunbird, a hand-me-down from my sister that produced 78 horsepower on its best day—which it was not having the day she handed it down. A four-banger that could barely beat the buses up the hill to Alexander Hamilton High School—maybe a haircut would have lightened its load.
During most of my career I maintained three cars, to accommodate my needs and moods which ranged from sedans to SUVs and from sports cars to four-wheelers. Logging more than 40,000 miles each year behind the wheel of one of them, in my effort to traffic enough paint to pay for them all.
But since I sold my stores and since Dan Calkins told me that I was no longer welcome in Montvale, I’ve been forced to buy my own cars (as opposed to running them through the business) and I’m driving fewer miles. Effects which shifted my perspective on car ownership, an awakening further enabled by a move to Stamford, Connecticut, a nearly-urban center which can be frustrating to drive and offers short walks to most essentials. Often causing my car to sit unmoved from the curb for weeks at a time, calling the whole scheme into question.
As the end of my lease approached, I was wondering if life might be better carless. Perhaps thinking exactly that at the moment an uninsured driver collided with me just two weeks before lease-end, warning enough to decide to go carless for the first time since the original Iranian oil crisis. Relieving me of any fear of rising gas prices, which seems to be well timed. And of the rising cost of leasing and insuring a car in the United States, adding to the appeal of this right-sizing.
Still, it feels as though a relationship is ending—though it was not always a good one.
Benjamin Moore told employees last week that it will be closing the manufacturing facility located in Milford, Massachusetts, the end of life for the 60-year-old plant set on 20 lakefront acres with bike trails in that city’s downtown. A less than desirable location for manufacturing paint, even for a company as committed to stewardship as I know Ben Moore to be, which must come at a hefty price in that setting. Milford’s production will be moved to Moore’s Johnstown facility less than 200 miles away, though sources tell me that Moore intends to maintain a distribution center there, servicing the company’s New England dealer network. The closure impacted “fewer than 40 employees,” who were all offered ongoing employment at Moore, according to my sources.
Also last week, PPG Industries announced it will be ceasing operations at its Ozark Materials facility in Greenville, Alabama on November 30. PPG acquired Ozark in April of this year for just $65 million from Ingevity Corporation, which had paid $325 million for Ozark less than four years earlier. Proving that it’s not just PPG that can kill a paint brand, though I’m sure they plan to finish the job with Ozark, which seems likely to be absorbed into PPG’s billion-dollar (est.) Traffic Solutions segment. The closure will impact 52 employees, who will be laid off that day, after which PPG claims that everything will be better for everyone.
Except those 52.
