Listen to “#704 Retail Gangster: The Insane Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie” on Spreaker.
On this episode of The Small Business Radio Show…
SEGMENT 1 with Gary Weiss, starting at 0:00: Crazy Eddie was one of the most brazen, longest-running frauds in history. For twenty years, the criminal mastermind Eddie Antar fooled everyone he came into contact with, from Wall Street ‘masters of the universe’ to the government, the media, and the people who came into his stores. How’d he do it and what happened to him?
SEGMENT 2 with Grant McCracken, starting at 19:30: A hundred years ago, when we went from an agrarian society to an industrialized one, life changed for most Americans. It changed where we lived, how we worked, and what we did in our spare time. Is our society changing yet again—from an industrial economy to an artisan one?
SEGMENT 3 with Howard Makler, starting at 36:00: What if I told you there was a payroll tax refund out there for every small business that has employees that could net you $10,000s or $100,000s? You want to hear more, right?
Sponsored by Truly Financial.
More on each segment below.
Segment 1: Gary Weiss is the author of a new book called “Retail Gangster: The Insane Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie”. He has been uncovering Wall Street wrongdoing for nearly two decades.
1:30 – Who was Eddie Antar?
4:30 – What kinds of aggressive business practices did he use?
8:45 – The crooked business practices that weren’t caught by the auditors.
11:00 – The story of the Crazy Eddie commercial.
13:30 – One of the chapters is titled “Rip their eyes out.” What’s that about?
14:45 – What can businesspeople today learn from Crazy Eddie’s fraud scheme?
Segment 2: Grant McCracken is a cultural anthropologist who has studied American culture for 25 years. He has worked for many organizations including Timberland, New York Historical Society, IKEA, Google, Ford Foundation, Kanye West, Netflix, Sony, Coca-Cola, Sam Adams, Boston Book Festival, Delta, Oprah, Reddit, PBS, State Farm, NBC, Diageo, IBM, Nike, and the Obama White House. He is the inventor of The Griff, an early warning system for social and cultural change (see www.mapping-the-future.com). He is credited with spotting the rise of Donald Trump, the fall of Second Life, and the disruption of CPG by Alice Waters and the artisanal movement.
19:30 – We are moving from the industrial economy to an artisan one.
23:00 – What does an artisan economy look like?
25:45 – Artisans change the rules about capitalism, retail, production, and marketing.
27:00 – How do artisans make their money?
29:30 – What are the keys to being successful in the artisan economy?
33:15 – What are your favorite artisan products?
Segment 3: Howard Makler, founder and CEO of Innovation Refunds, began his career starting Howie’s Game Shack. Howie’s Game Shack pioneered eSports offering 1000 PCs and Xboxes all networked together for in-store competitions, with over 1 million hours of gameplay at their location. Today, he is focused on growing Innovation Refunds to help as many small businesses as possible, educating owners and service providers to receive the payroll tax credit.
36:00 – Tell us how you pioneered eSports!
38:30 – What is the Employer Retention Credit (ERC)?
41:15 – How do you qualify?
42:30 – How much can businesses earn from the Employer Retention Credit if they qualify?
45:00 – Is this a legitimate opportunity?
47:30 – How does Innovation Refunds help small businesses claim the often-overlooked Employee Retention Credit? To date, they’ve helped 10,000 companies receive over $1 billion dollars in refunds.
49:00 – The positive effects of the Employer Retention Credit.
Growing up in western Massachusetts, for some reason we got the NYC channels on cable TV, so Crazy Eddie’s commercials were a staple while watching 11 Alive in the 80’s. I too thought Eddie was the actor in the commercial, like everybody else did.
It’s interesting to see how the brand has such recognition, yet it was never able to be relaunched to another venture.