look-alike credit : JONATHAN ERNST / Reuters / Landov
In every debate this campaign season , Mitt Romney has been hammer by his Republican competitor for fundamentally instruct companies how to transport jobs oversea during his days at Bain . Romney almost always responds by saying he really created jobs , and helped start Staples . Did Romney really have a hand in creating an office provision monster ?
He did . More accurately , he win over a crowd of people with a lot of money that Staples ' patronage manikin would work . He also put in a few shift at the first store .
Let ’s start at the beginning .
In 1984 , Romney left consulting firm Bain & Company to co - found their fresh private equity investment business firm , Bain Capital . Not long after , supermarket executive Thomas G. Stemberg approached Bain with an idea . According to Staples society lore , Stemberg was working on a patronage marriage offer over a vacation weekend when his printer ribbon broke . " After driving from depot to store and not finding the correct ribbon , " Staples.com explains , " Tom came to a realization : The world need a supermarket for office products . "
When Stemberg went looking for a venture Washington , he got laugh out of power all over Boston . The problem , as most investors take care it , was that the customers Stemberg was trying to draw were n’t used to going to a store to buy at for power supplies . For the farsighted time , they ’d ordered pens from one trafficker , newspaper from another , and had everything delivered . No way was a retail startup give out to deepen this deeply impress consumer behavior .
The True Cost of Pens
When Stemberg accept the idea to Bain , Romney was intrigue , but his fellow worker were uneasy . Romney decided to do a little enquiry and the firm began surveying small businesses in the area . They discover that stage business managers often recall they were spending very little on supplies , and believed it would be more to institutionalise someone to a computer storage to corrupt them . When they talked to controller at the same business , though , they often found the places were spending as much as five times more than direction thought . Romney figure the savings Stemberg ’s entrepot could ply justify someone having to really go there . He took his sight results to his collaborator and convert them that Stemberg ’s model could exploit . They agreed , and gave Stemberg the initial funding for what would eventually become the Staples chain .
Romney ’s role did n’t end there . He was very mired with the first Staples store when it opened . Stemberg was short on hands , so the Bain Capital guy helped out , picking out the computer system and stocking ledge for the first few weeks it was open .
Romney did n’t line of descent printers for long , but he did sit on the Staples card for year . Even out of the store , he put in hard work , though . In his VC days , Romney reportedly have so accent out and wield himself so much that he regularly sweat through his frock shirt .
