Find your new center in American Can and live surrounded by the energy, style, culture, and action of New Orleans most coveted neighborhoods. Professionally Managed by. Powered by. Website Design by. Mon - Fri am - pm. Saturday am - pm. Despite the stabilization of record prices in recent years, the trend toward home recording technology has kept Pickwick from recovering completely. To make matters worse, the Sam Goody record store chain, part of Pickwick's retail network, was investigated by the Justice Department.
A number of the top officials at Goody were indicted for allegedly dealing in counterfeit records and tapes. American Can reported the improprieties quickly and in good faith, but the damage had been done. Many Wall Street analysts and members of the container industry thought American Can had gone too far afield in entering the record business and that it was unsound financial planning. The Goody scandal seemed to confirm these misgivings and shake the confidence of investors in American Can's ability to make successful acquisitions.
Fingerhut, the direct-marketing firm purchased by the company at the height of the mail-order retail explosion, carved out a market for itself by catering to a group often overlooked by others in the industry, namely, the low to medium income household.
Fingerhut developed computerized profiles of each of its four million customers and then marketed products corresponding to their demands. This established for Fingerhut a loyal and growing consumer block. In the meantime, the corrective modernization measures taken by May were not enough to keep the company from losing more and more of its market share.
The company was still lagging behind Continental Can and others in the shift away from steel to aluminum and plastics. Moreover, recycling laws of various types were passed in a number of states, resulting in greater consumer interest in glass which is cheaper and easier to "send through the mill" a second time.
These things served to worsen American Can's already unstable financial situation and depressed employee morale. Taking his place and inheriting his problems was William Woodside, a man with a reputation for being a brilliant business strategist and a tough administrator. Woodside joined American Can in as an economist, and then later became the marketing director at Dixie Paper in In he moved back to the home company to become second in command at American Can under May.
When Woodside took the helm of American Can he soon learned that his largest problem was money; he did not have enough of it to keep the company from lapsing into permanent stagnation. Woodside was faced with a dilemma: American Can needed growth via acquisitions in order to generate investment funds, but these acquisitions required capital outlays that the company simply did not have. Rather than circumvent this problem, Woodside developed a plan designed to overcome it. He called it "asset redeployment," a program in which tangential and unprofitable business would be sold so as to generate the liquid capital needed to invest in areas of greater growth potential.
Both the Dixie-Marathon paper operation and the American Can container plants were highly capital intensive. Woodside understood that no company could withstand the financial strain and resource costs of maintaining large interests in two such industries. One of them had to be sold, and there was really little choice as to which it was going to be. Dixie had been marginally profitable throughout its history, despite losing ground to competitors like Northern Paper, and timberlands were highly regarded by Wall Street at the time; selling Dixie-Marathon would not be difficult.
The company's can operation, on the other hand, was considered part of a dying industry; what is more, it maintained a very costly labor pension plan. The sale of Dixie, however, was not as smooth as American Can had hoped. Woodside waited too long before accepting offers from potential buyers and before long interest in timberlands began to wane. Woodside, too, recognized the error in strategy. Before the sale of Dixie was finalized Woodside sought to acquire new businesses, particularly those in the sectors of financial services and insurance.
Woodside was encouraged to make the purchase by Gerald Tsai, the "boy wonder" of the stock market who had financial interests in Madison. Tsai, who was born in Shanghai and then educated in the United States at Boston University, made a reputation for himself on Wall Street during the 's. As an expert trader he made a great deal of money in a short period of time. In he started the Manhattan Fund, raising millions of dollars by convincing investors he would yield them high returns.
The project turned out badly, however. Tsai lost most of the money and the confidence of investors. Following this fall from grace, Tsai spent 12 years positioning himself for a possible comeback. He quietly became a major force in the insurance trade; and associating with American Can was just what he needed to make his return.
By Tsai was a vice chairman and major stockholder at American Can, and proved to be an indispensable ally to Woodside in his sometimes unpopular attempts to redirect American Can's capital into financial services. Two dozen plasma television screens broadcast live scenes of the Manhattan skyline and local news. Giuseppe Legano of LOT-EK explains, "they can be used creatively to repeat the view of New York, so that it seems to be everywhere in the room, or splitting it into fragments so the screens make a whole 'painting' or to produce a panorama" Quoted in Martin.
The sales lobby has a hanging sculpture made of paint cans to reflect the historic use of the site. Residents may enjoy the amenities of a 10, square-foot recreational facility. Martin, Antoinette. Kaulessar, Ricardo. It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.
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