The Tragedy of Jack
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about a road salesman in the sporting goods industry who had been an acquaintance of our family for a long time.
If you are not familiar with how it works, people like him are self-employed entrepreneurs who get hired under contract by manufacturing companies to “rep” a line. Though arrangements differ from firm to firm (a few put these reps on salary and require exclusivity, for example), generally they handle the wholesale orders, serve as the direct point of contact for business-to-business purchasing agents, fend off competition by getting the best shelf space or clients, help improve sales, and generally work as the hand of the manufacturer at the distribution point to end consumer. Using the historical model, if you began manufacturing, say, leather footballs, you’d hire reps across the country to go out and be your sales force. Likewise, if you owned a sporting goods store, you’d work with many reps from various businesses, all of whom were your conduit to suppliers and who would be trying to get you to place more orders since their bread is buttered by the commissions they earn on your volume.
This man, Jack, was the representative for several different sporting goods manufacturers. He was the first sales rep my parents ever hired when they started their manufacturing business.
From the outside, looking at his life and history, your inner economist couldn’t help but run numbers.
He was never married, never had any children, and, living life on the road as a salesman, didn’t have a lot of opportunity to spend money.
He was surrounded by people who were working hard for a living, so there was little sales pressure to spend on flashy items – no Mercedes or Brioni necessary here (if anything it would have been a severe detriment).
On paper, he should have ended up one of those secret millionaire types who dies at 85 years old, only to have everyone shocked to discover he had either a bank vault with $30,000,000 in shares generating $900,000 a year in dividend income or owned an incredible collection of real estate pumping out rents, from office buildings to apartment complexes. By that point, he’d have been self employed for almost three-quarters of a century; certainly enough time to let compounding work its magic provided he chose one of the two highest returning asset classes. Given his employment status, he would have been able to shield relatively huge amounts of that income from taxes over the years, establishing things like a SEP-IRA, with its generous $50,000+ annual contribution limits.
On top of all of this, housing in retirement wouldn’t have been a problem. He owned a beautiful cabin down in Oklahoma that had been in his family for generations.
There were only two people in his life with which he was particularly close, his parents, as well as his dog.
Since the Great Recession, things had not been going well. He lost many of his product lines as retailers failed, the volume on others dried up as businesses cut back on cash outlays to protect their financial condition, and he was getting older, suffering from some health problems.
Though it was a terrible business decision, and economically irrational, my parents kept him on the books for many, many more years than was justified as the Internet and automation had allowed most of his function to be performed on a server for a fraction of the cost before the business relationship finally ended. Aaron and I had built an online ordering system for them that was similar to what we employed in our online retailers and rather than pay on terms, customers had to pay up-front completely flipping the cash conversion cycle. A new website brought dealers directly to their doorsteps in a GEICO-like model. Account servicing moved to be handled in-house with same-day turnaround, email confirmations as statuses changed in near-real time on the production process, and notes could be kept both for internal use and forward-facing to the customer on specific orders. Printed catalogs, while still available for awhile, were discontinued in favor of private libraries that reflected the actual products a dealer wanted to sell to its local schools.
Jack switched over to representing one of my parents’ competitors who had not modernized and, from what I hear, was personally close with them and even got him to regularly attend their church and Bible Study for moral support so he wasn’t alone as the world went through a major economic transformation at the same time technological adaptation was entering the smart phone era.
Unknown to anyone at the time, his life unraveled. In the midst of this economic pain and uncertainty, the news filled with daily foreclosures and old ways of doing business changing, his parents died, leaving him alone except for his dog. His income dwindling, and his savings exhausted, he was unable to keep up the mortgage on his new home, let alone on his former home which had collapsed on the market, causing both to go into foreclosure. It turns out that as a last resort, he had mortgaged his family’s cabin, too, and it was taken. He found himself homeless, with only his dog.
And then his dog died.
Again, nearly no one knew any of this. We certainly didn’t at the time. Jack even left a comment once on this site, which I know now was happening as he felt swept away by the maelstrom. He sent me a message in the inbox fairly recently that was rather earnest, concluding with, “Please call. I hope to hear from you.” but gave no indication that anything was wrong. I was busy and never managed to get back to him even though I kept thinking about it before going on to something else (which isn’t unusual – my family resorts to outright stopping by sometimes because I throw myself into whatever project is on my desk so I’m impossible to reach at time and I’d usually see him around when he’d stop in to visit my family’s factory so I figured it was just a matter of time until I could catch up during his next visit).
Though we don’t know all of the details, and it’s second hand, multiple sources tell us it wasn’t long after he sent that message that he shot himself in the car that he had come to call home. He didn’t survive. His family line is ended. He left nothing of Earthly value. His spirit gone in a way that will be completely and totally forgotten before too many more decades roll past, without even the echoes of influence found in most lives.
Aside from the utterly baffling mathematics of it – short of a gambling, drug, or other addiction problem, I cannot fathom how he didn’t have at least a few million dollars because even his spending patterns have little to show for them; not like he had Faberge eggs or collectible cars in storage – the tragedy of it just seems so profound. It makes no sense. None of it. I feel sorrow when I think of him, and how his life ended, because I cannot imagine that as he grew up in childhood, went out into the world, and clearly had a lot of fun in his career, he had any indication that his story would end utterly alone, homeless, and with such violence at his own hand. There is no mental box for me to put it in that causes the pieces to fit.