Word: costers
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...when President F. Donald Coster looked in his bathroom mirror and shot himself through the head, it was widely supposed that the $87,000,000 drug firm of McKesson & Robbins would die with him in all the bathrooms of the U. S. But this week, after 26 months in the bankruptcy courts, McKesson was ready to go back to its owners, and it was anything but dead. On the basis of de-Costerized accounting, its 1940 sales and profits were the best in its 108-year history...
Another wreath belonged on the grave of F. Donald Coster. For although he milked McKesson of almost $3,000.000, Mr. Coster, a dynamic and farseeing businessman as well as a crook, had gathered for the purpose a herd of very sturdy cows. Less than 5% of McKesson business comes from its own branded drugs, vulnerable to the scandalous publicity. Most of the rest is a distributing business, which wholesales some 48,000 different items, from alarm clocks to Coca-Cola syrup, to some 30,000 independent drugstores throughout...
McKesson's far-flung subsidiaries were once independent local drug wholesalers. When Coster lured these wholesalers (over 50 of them) into his gigantic merger during 1928-37, he paid them handsomely in McKesson stock, but he made sure he got the best in each area. So firmly were these houses and their salesmen entrenched in the U. S. drug trade that the Coster suicide affected their sales hardly at all. Within nine months after the trustee took over, McKesson sales made a new high...
When the truth about the crude drug fantasy was first announced, a Price, Waterhouse man exclaimed, "Why, that's the best-run department in the business." Wrote Coster to Price, Waterhouse in 1936: ". . . Only in auditing [has] our company really got its money's worth." During the two years since McKesson's receivership and Coster's suicide, McKesson (under Trustee William Jed Wardall) has made gradual progress toward reorganization. One of Trustee Wardall's jobs is to recover assets; one source of recoveries was Coster's board of directors, who gave him enough votes...
Last week, in spite of all, Price, Waterhouse came to terms with the trustee. Of their $1,000,000-plus fees from the old McKesson, they offered to repay $522,402.29-the total of their fees from 1933 to Coster's suicide. Mr. Wardall submitted the proposal to the court, expected approval this week. Price, Waterhouse, meanwhile, whose auditing standards have been more rigid since Coster's death, prepared to send the bill for most of the $522,000 to their insurers, Lloyds...