The recession-proof powers of the Jheri Curl:

Jon Medow interviews his father, Dan Medow

Jon: Tell me about your experience running a business during the recession period of the early ’80s.

Dan: The early 1980s. That was the era of the Jheri Curl.

At that time I owned a company called Standard Distributing out of Detroit, Michigan, and we were suppliers of ethnic hair care products to major chain stores across the United States. If we’ve pegged this period correctly as the period of the Jheri Curl, then I can tell you that the company did not have a recession.

Until that time, [the Jheri Curl] had only been done in salons, where they would charge patrons in excess of $100 to effect this particular style. Well, there was a company based out of Texas by the name of ProLine and its owner, Comer Cottrell, came up with a retail version of this salon treatment. Comer called it the ProLine Curly Kit, and this kit sold for $6.95. Suddenly, a style that had cost over $100 dollars could be achieved for less than $10.

So what happened was that this took off and was, at that time, our fastest-selling item. We were selling it literally by the truckloads. We could not get it out fast enough. They could not make it fast enough.

Other people, of course, caught on to the technology and brought out similar items. We had a definite advantage here, so we sort of blew past the recession at that time because the style was the driving force of the market, as it often is.

The interesting thing is that because the industry at that time was style-driven, this could happen. If we hadn’t had that style, we probably would have been in the tank.

Jon: So, without the Jheri Curl, the early ’80s could have been disastrous for you?

Dan: Yes, they could have been. But on the other hand, we were selling products that were not terribly expensive, so people could use them no matter what. In the African-American community at that time, probably the majority of women were straightening their hair. And if they were going to straighten their hair, they were going to straighten their hair. People are going to do their hair no matter what; one of the last things that will go [in times of economic hardship] is appearance. People will wear clothes until they either become very out of style, or need to be replaced, but hairstyles, haircuts, makeup, lipsticks, will continue to be used on a regular basis. It’s safe.

Intellectual cops and industrial salt:

Kelli Korducki interviews her father, Rick Korducki.

Kelli: What was your experience of recession?

Rick: My experience of recession happened approximately between the years of 1975 and 1980. During this time, I was in university.

While I was in school it was so difficult to find employment, even for students. You felt really fortunate if you were able to find a job. There were hardly even fast food jobs available.

Then, when we graduated, we faced a horrible job market. If you didn’t come out of school with a very specific skill that just happened to be in demand, you found yourself going for all sorts of things.

I remember knowing people who were very overqualified for the jobs they were doing. I knew a guy who graduated from university with high distinction, very bright, and he was selling clothes in a clothing store for some time. He eventually wound up becoming quite successful, but for people who were leaving school at that time, it took three or four years longer to get into a meaningful professional career path than it probably would have otherwise. There were a lot of people who were in a holding pattern, underemployed, while waiting for the economy to turn around.

Kelli: Do you see any parallels between what you experienced then, and what’s happening with the economy now?

Rick: Definitely. Of course, we’re not really in it to the extent that we will be soon.

I had a friend who was a police officer in a Denver, Colorado suburb that only hired university graduates. So I went out there and actually applied for a job as a police officer, and of course it didn’t take them a long time to figure out that I was very ill-suited for that type of employment.

Employment was so bad that I remember interviewing for a job as an industrial salt salesman. I answered an ad in the classifieds and drove down to this place in the industrial valley in Milwaukee. This guy sees me and he asks me if I have any sales experience. I say, “Not really,” but explain to him that I’m a liberally educated person and that I have a university degree.

So, he walks me out and we’re standing next to this mountain of industrial salt, like about two or three stories high and he tells me, “Well, there’s the salt. It’s really a product that kind of sells itself.” And I said, “I guess it better.” Needless to say, I didn’t get that job.

Kelli: What was your degree in again?

Rick: My degree was in Latin American Studies and Spanish Literature.

Everybody in Argentina has a story:

Bill Rios tells his son, Dan Rios, his side.

The best story of terrible things—stupid things—is the story of what happened to us while living in Argentina.

We have the visa to go to Canada. We have our ticket and we sold everything we owned. Anything that had to go to Canada had already been sent: we were ready to roll.

We sold our apartment and signed the papers after the banks closed on April 1, 1982. We wake up the next morning to find that Argentina was invading the Falklands. Money exchanges were shut down across the country—we couldn’t exchange the Argentinean pesos we were given for American dollars.

In an act of desperation, I went to a foreign exchange dealer and bought third-party cheques in U.S. dollars at a 40 per cent premium. In one day, we lost 40 per cent of our life savings.

A month later, when we were leaving, I could have bought two and half apartments like the one I sold with the money I had. The peso’s value dropped like a rock. We knew that the war was lost, but it took 48 hours for Argentineans to learn they had lost the Falklands to the British.

The economy went into a tailspin. It kept going for the next six years, to the point that the elected president had to turn over governmental power to the newly elected president before his term was up. The entire country was falling apart. This was Carlos Menem, who sold the country and privatized everything. Then it collapsed again.

The problem only stopped when Menem took the drastic measure of declaring one peso equal to one American dollar. It stopped inflation dead in its tracks—but it caused yet another governmental bankruptcy.

You learn to live with the inflation. You don’t have a budget, you don’t know how much money you are going to earn next month, and you can’t save. The money that you save loses value. The trick is to be constantly in debt as much as you can. The more money you owe, the better off you are.

How do you handle the crisis? Ignore it. You have to disconnect. A trick we used to have for going to the supermarket: because the inflation was so high, they would re-mark the prices twice a week. You would go to the market, and if it was one of the days when they were changing prices, you would see where they were adjusting the prices, and run ahead to the other parts of the store that weren’t yet changed. You could save five to seven per cent if you did this.

How do you deal with it? You have to be resilient, you have to be adaptive. You have to have guts.

Everybody has a story in Argentina.