This makes no sense. "Under the radar" from who? Joe and Jane Average on the street maybe, but stores that are making orders are going to have reps dropping by, and the suppliers are going to KNOW that if Store A is carrying product XYZ, and it's not getting it from (e.g.) Sysco, it's coming from somewhere else. I can't imagine unmarked trucks keep C&S off the radar from anybody who actually cares.
Edit: On re-read, maybe it -is- supposed to be stealth from Joe and Jane Average. Initially I thought they might be attributing "stealth" to the success of C&S. I guess they really just wanted to be quietly (to the public) doing their work. In that case: great job invading privacy Daily Ticker. "Nobody's Business" indeed.
HEY GUYS A BIG COMPANY!!!
You can also do code analysis: look at branching factors; code duplication; runtime performance; etc
This might be hard to implement in a company setting; but it may be easier to apply with contracting work.
This is basically a version of Campbell's law, from a 1976 paper by Donald T. Campbell: "The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
Lines of code per unit time (LOC) is probably the most notorious, but there have been dozens of attempted improvements. Function point metrics were a late-'70s approach (also out of IBM) that tried to fix some of LOC's shortcomings as productivity metric, but turned out to be highly correlated to LOC and also problematic. There are dozens of books from the past 50 years with titles like "Applied Software Measurement" and "Measuring the Software Process", but they've become associated with bureaucratic bigcorp software engineering.
Incentives are powerful things.
Not bad for a family-owned business.
Investigating people, especially those with any kind of political, economic, cultural, academic, or other influence, based on publicly available information and whatever people are willing to tell you if you ask, is a pretty traditional part of American public life. There's no right to force people to be disinterested in what you do and refrain from writing articles about it, as long as they collect the information by legal means.
Bloomberg have been battling the government in the courts for years over FOIA requests to disclose secret information to the public on a variety of issues.
For example they were very aggressive in investigating and publishing details of secret dealings between the largest US financial institutions and the government during the financial crisis:
Bloomberg Sues Fed to Force Disclosure of Collateral (Update1) [1]
Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Secret Loans [2]
Fed’s Once-Secret Data Compiled by Bloomberg Released to Public [3]
As well as publishing details on billionaires who manipulate the system from the shadows (e.g. the Koch brothers):
David Koch’s Chilling Effect on Public Television [4]
Koch Funneled $1.2 Million to Governors Battling Unions [5]
Koch’s Iran Link Causes Democrat to Send Donation to Charity [6]
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aKr.o...
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristoc...
[3] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-23/fed-s-once-secret-d...
[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-09/david-koch-s-chilli...
[5] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-23/koch-funneled-1-2-m...
[6] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-18/koch-iran-link-caus...
It's not a joke, and your comment is not funny.
“I tried to put our name on the trucks and he didn’t want any part of it,” said Edward Albertian, a former C&S president, to Bloomberg. “He wanted to continue to be stealth and operate in this little, dinky Keene, New Hampshire, marketplace.”
Little, dinky marketplace that brings in over a 1 billion dollars in sales...
"According to Bloomberg, the company had sales of $21.7 billion last year ..."
And yes the big question - why now?
And the second big question - how many other quiet billion dollar or even just 8figure companies are out there?
What they don't highlight is that they grew from about $500m in revenue to $20bn in about 20 years from 88 to 2006: http://bit.ly/1a12pkU. C&S did this by innovating on management models at the warehouse, having a capital model which grew its cash position as it expanded, and helping to support the business case for private equity acquisitions of major US Grocery Chains.
This article also misses one major point. Rick is innovating again. ES3 (http://www.es3.com/) is the largest automated warehouse in the world. As this warehouse scales, it could take a full step out of the grocery supply chain for the east coast.
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/21/private-companies-10_lan...
I'm guessing most people haven't heard of half the companies in the top ten, unless you're a consumer business you can be huge and almost no-one will recognize your name.
Here's a little test, how many of these companies do you recognize:
Bazaarvoice, Conduit, Klarna, nicira, Homeaway, Workday, Changyou, ServiceNow, Giant, Guidewire, DealerTrack, SuccessFactors, SourceFire, ArcSight, Popcap, ExactTarget.
They're all tech startups with valuations estimated in the billion+ dollar range. Unless you've used them you'll probably have never come across them.
Although in this case, they might actually hold a better claim on that title than others it is often given to
Low key, large profits, extensive distribution network. I may be paranoid but...
(Okay, probably just a coincidence/I've been watching too much tv recently.)
