Kirby

The company has sales of about $700 million derived from 17 businesses, many leaders in their fields. Return on invested capital is good to excellent for most of these businesses. Some well-known products are Kirby home-care systems, Campbell Hausfeld air compressors, and Wayne burners and water pumps.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: This morning, I had to chide some of the fellows down the stairs at the Kirby. A couple of weeks ago, there was a stain — or a tarnish — appeared on the Berkshire Hathaway name, and a little crack appeared in the charisma. Did you happen to see the program? WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, I saw the program. And it was interesting because it was focusing on the sales practices — or alleged sales practices — of some people that don’t work for us, but work for distributors, just like salesmen work for Ford dealers or something of the sort. And particularly, it was talking about them selling to older people. And interestingly enough, over 10 years ago, we put in a policy, which to my knowledge is the only one like it in the country, in that anybody, anybody over 65 who buys a Kirby vacuum and is unhappy for any reason, any time, up to a year, 11 months and 29 days later, can tell us so and they get their money back without question. And I don’t know of another consumer durable sold like that in the country. And one of the interesting things was that the fellow they interviewed, who talked about his mother having bought one and being terribly unhappy about it, had actually used the product for eight or nine months and gotten a full refund. And that fact was not mentioned on the program, nor was the fact even that we had this policy. And I really regard that as rather extraordinary journalism.