I learned something about business in a restaurant in Killeen, Texas, sometime in the late 1960s, although I didn’t know I was learning anything at the time. I was eating with a fellow named Roy Leach, and while he kept an eye on the front door, I was fooling around with the little jukebox selector mounted on the wall beside our booth.
That sentence requires some explaining if you weren’t hanging around restaurants when jukeboxes were an important part of the furnishings.
Killeen sat alongside Fort Hood, now called Fort Cavazos, and in those days soldiers were a major part of the local economy. Roy owned the Avenue D Newsstand, which was considerably more interesting than the word newsstand suggests. It sold magazines and assorted novelties that young soldiers could use themselves, take home, or send to somebody who might be surprised to receive them. There was also a pinball arcade, which provided another useful method for separating soldiers from some of their spare change.
Roy didn’t seem tied to his business the way some owners were. I hung around with him and Fawez Assed quite a bit at Fawez’s Bluebonnet Cafe, and while the other fellows struck me as more of the management team, Roy seemed to be the floater. He was around people, around businesses and around ideas. I wouldn’t have described him as an idea generator then because I wasn’t studying how people generated ideas. He was simply Roy, and he seemed to have the freedom to wander around and see what was going on.
I don’t remember exactly why the two of us were in this particular restaurant. I don’t remember going there with him again, so I don’t think Roy took me there to demonstrate anything. As nearly as I can reconstruct it, we were simply eating.
The restaurant itself I can still see reasonably well. It was a brick building along Highway 190, a little unusual for the town. You came through a glass front door into a small foyer, presumably so every arriving customer didn’t let a fresh load of Texas heat into the air-conditioned dining room. A counter ran along the right side as you entered, with the cash register at the corner where the counter turned back toward the wall. There were tables in the middle and booths along the walls. At the far end stood the main jukebox.
We were sitting in a booth along the front wall. My back was generally toward the entrance because Roy had made damned sure his wasn’t.
Roy had a thing about doors.
He would not sit in a restaurant where he couldn’t see who was coming through the entrance. If I got into the wrong side of the booth first, he would smile and tell me to move. He was pleasant about it, but I learned that Roy smiling did not necessarily mean Roy was making a suggestion.
His explanation was Wild Bill Hickok. Hickok had been shot in the back while playing poker, and according to Roy that was what happened when a man who knew better sat with his back toward the door. Whether a gunfighter killed in Deadwood nearly a century earlier was a sensible basis for choosing restaurant seating in Killeen was apparently not open for discussion. Roy had examined the evidence and established policy.
That left me facing the wall, where there was something to play with.
Put in Your Money and Pick a Record
The little machine beside me was a remote jukebox selector. If you’ve never encountered one, imagine the jukebox at the other end of the restaurant having a small outpost attached to the wall beside your booth. There were little pages or cards showing the records available on the main machine. You flipped through the choices, put in your money and pushed the appropriate buttons. Your selection was transmitted to the main jukebox, which eventually played your record.
I was looking through those selections when the subject came up.
I don’t remember the exact conversation that got us there, so I’m not going to manufacture one sixty years later. Somehow that little machine led Roy to tell me about the business behind it, and what had looked like a coin-operated convenience suddenly became something else.
Rowy and the others owned a company called Central Music Company. Central Music Company had installed the jukebox system in the restaurant. That meant more than putting the big machine against the wall and plugging it in. There were selectors at the booths, and all of them had to be connected back to the main jukebox. By the time the equipment and wiring were installed, Central had several thousand dollars invested in that restaurant location.
I hadn’t seen several thousand dollars.
I had seen a little box on the wall.
That difference is what makes the story interesting to me now.
The Restaurant Owner Had an Idea
The jukebox generated money, and some arrangement determined how that money was divided between the restaurant and the amusement company. Another operator, K&A, apparently decided it wanted the location and offered the restaurant owner a better share.
The owner switched companies.
From his point of view, that probably made perfectly good sense. He had a piece of floor space and a supply of customers. Two amusement companies wanted access to both, and one was willing to pay him more than the other. If you can get more money for essentially the same thing, taking it is not among mankind’s stranger business decisions.
Central eventually offered enough to get the location back.
Now the restaurant owner had learned something else. He had learned that the amusement companies could be moved.
I don’t know how many times this happened or exactly how the negotiations progressed, and that isn’t necessary to the part of Roy’s story that stayed with me. The owner apparently decided that playing one company against another was a pretty good way to increase his share, and at some point he tried it again.
There is a trap hiding in that kind of success. When something works once, you naturally begin to think you understand why it worked. The restaurant owner had discovered that Central didn’t want to lose his location, and he was right.
What he apparently had not discovered was how badly they didn’t want to lose it, or what else they were willing to do about it.
They Bought the Mortgage
Central didn’t make another better offer. Roy and his partners went to the bank and bought the mortgage on the restaurant. Then they served the owner with an eviction notice and the restaurant changed hands while Central Music kept the jukebox location.
That was the part of the story that stayed in my head. I don’t remember the legal details, the amount of the mortgage, what happened to the former owner afterward, or precisely what part Roy personally played in the transaction. Those pieces are gone, assuming I ever knew them.
But I remember sitting there looking at that jukebox selector while Roy explained what had happened.
The little machine beside me hadn’t changed. It still had its flipper pages of record choices, its push buttons and its coin slot. Put money in, pick a song, and eventually music came out of the big box at the other end of the room.
What changed was what I could see when I looked at it.
Until Roy told me the story, I had been looking at a machine. Central Music had been looking at an investment. The restaurant owner had been looking at additional income. K&A had been looking at a location it could take from a competitor. The bank had been looking at a mortgage.
All of those things were sitting in the same damned restaurant.
I could see only the jukebox.
The Thing You See May Not Be the Thing That Matters
I wish I could tell you that young Kirk walked out of that restaurant having grasped a profound principle about business. He didn’t. At least I have no memory that he did.
I had heard a hell of a story.
That may have been all it was for quite a while.
Years later I worked in restaurants myself. Later still I went into commercial lending, where a large part of the job was learning that what somebody asked you to finance wasn’t necessarily what you needed to understand. A fellow could walk into the bank wanting money for a machine, a building or another truck. The thing he wanted to buy was obvious because it was sitting right there on the loan application. Whether he could repay the money might depend on customers, cash flow, inventory, leases, management, debt, suppliers and a dozen relationships that weren’t sitting on the desk looking nearly as important.
Did Roy’s jukebox story cause me to think that way later?
I don’t know.
That’s an important distinction around here. I’m rummaging through eighty-four years of accumulated experiences trying to understand where ideas, habits and ways of thinking might have come from. It would be very easy to find an early story that resembles something I did later and announce that I’ve discovered the source.
I haven’t.
What I can say is that Roy put something into my inventory that day. I encountered the idea that the visible object and the business surrounding it could be two very different things. Whether that particular piece sat unused, reinforced something already there, or eventually became part of some later way I approached a problem is harder to establish. My memory doesn’t come with little labels showing which experience supplied which later thought.
Come to think of it, that’s probably why I’m building this website.
Now Look at Something You Think You Understand
You’ve got your own jukebox selectors.
There are things in your work, your business and probably your house that you have stopped examining because you already know what they are. You know what the cash register does. You know what the delivery truck does. You know what that employee does. You know what the customer is buying. You know why that procedure exists because everybody has been doing it since somewhere around the invention of dirt.
Maybe you do know.
But Roy taught me—whether he intended to or not—that knowing what something is may not tell you what you’re actually looking at.
So pick one ordinary thing in a business you know well and follow it outward. Don’t try to improve it. Don’t try to invent anything. Just find out what it touches. Who depends on it? What has been invested in it? What happens somewhere else when it changes? Who sees value in it that you don’t? Who gets hurt if it disappears?
Then tell us what you find.
You may discover absolutely nothing, in which case you have wasted several minutes looking at the business equivalent of a jukebox selector.
But you might discover a mortgage.