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or I am inappropriately dressed. He is waiting for a discount. Don't let him fool you. Well, the answer to the question about sales is very valid. I mean, selling is not our natural inclination. And on the other hand, we have held Washington Post shares since 1973. I have never sold Berkshire shares, having bought my first in 1962.
And we've held Coke stock since 1988. We have held Gillette shares since 1989. We have held American Express shares since 1991. We usually sell if we need money for something else, but in the last 10-15 years, this has not been a problem. 40 years ago, I only sold because I found something even better.
I didn't want to sell what I was selling, but I also didn't want to borrow money. So I reluctantly sold what I thought was very cheap in order to buy even cheaper . There were times when I had more ideas than money. Now I have more money than ideas. And that's a completely different equation. So now we only sell when we believe that...when we reevaluate the economic characteristics of the business.
We probably had some idea of โโthe company's long-term competitive advantage at the time of purchase . And we could change it. This doesn't mean that we think the company is entering a catastrophic period or anything like that. We believe McDonald's has a great future. We believe Disney has a great future, and there are others.
But we probably no longer consider their competitive advantage to be as strong as we thought when we made the initial decision. This could mean that we were wrong when we made this decision in the first place . Maybe we are wrong now and their strengths remain the same as before. But for one reason or another, we believe that these strengths have weakened to some extent.
A classic example of this, in my opinion, is the newspaper industry as a whole. I mean, in 1970, when Charlie and I looked at the newspaper business, we thought of it as just about the most unassailable franchise. We still think it's a good business. But we don't think this franchise is the same in 2002 as it was in 1970.
We don't think the franchise of a network television station in 2002 is the same as it was in 1965. And these beliefs change quite gradually, and who knows if they're accurate, you know, if they're even correct, but that's the main reason why we're selling now. If we were in a very cheap market, we could sell what we thought was cheap to buy something even cheaper after buying a lot of shares, but that's not the case now.
You know, I said it was a mistake to sell it, and it really was a mistake, and I just reported it for the sake of candor. And there were certain reasons why I thought this was something that we... I didn't think it was... I didn't think, obviously, that it was some great sell-off, or even a great sell-off, but I didn't think it was a place in the list of eight or ten companies, the few companies that we want to own in the world.
And I would say that, uh, this particular decision cost you about a billion dollars or more. Charlie? Do you want me to poke you in the nose with this? You're already doing it. You're doing great on your own. By the way, this is good practice at Berkshire. We are poking our noses into this ourselves, without even needing the help of accountants .
My guess is that with 23,000 locations worldwide, I think it would be extremely difficult to separate the real estate business from the franchise business at this point. I just think the problems would be terrible. Of course, you wouldn't want to sell it and rent it out, because in my opinion, you wouldn't get any more value by doing so.
And spinning that off into a real estate trust or something like that with operations in over 100 countries, with all the franchise agreements, I think would be a huge, huge challenge . I wouldn't want to take on this myself. I think you should view McDonald's as a very good business, but one that will continue in its current mode of real estate.
I would say that in the food business you will never get the complete confidence of dominance that you get in products like Coca-Cola and Gillette. People in the food business are constantly changing the places where they eat. They may prefer McDonald's, but they will go to different places at different times.
And anyone who starts shaving with a Gillette Sensor Plus razor is unlikely to switch to another, in my opinion. So, they don't...You would just never go into the food business, in my opinion. It's a completely different inevitability if you went into the soft drink business with Coca-Cola. In the food industry, you don't get the inevitability that you have with an individual consumer product.
Well , you know, like blades, for example. I mean, if I use a Gillette Sensor blade today, I'll obviously try the next one that comes along. But I wo n't experiment in between at all . They are satisfied with the product . You know, it's...it's not expensive. It's $20 a year, you know, if you're a typical user.
And if you get a great result, you won't experiment. Whereas many fast food decisions about where to eat are simply based on what you see. I mean, convenience is a huge factor. So if you're driving past a McDonald's, Burger King, or Wendy's, and you're hungry at that point, if you're on the road and you see one of these signs, you're probably going to stop...
you might as well stop at the one you see. Most people want to vary where they eat throughout the week, month, or year. And they don't really have any great desire to diversify their soft drinks in the same way. It's just...it's not the same thing. So this is not a criticism of McDonald's at all. It's just the nature of the type of industry they work in.
One of the companies I admire the most is McDonald's. I once made fun of a large university when I said that I thought McDonald's had achieved more success as an educator than the people at the university. And what I meant was that McDonald's hires a lot of people who are pretty insecure at the beginning of their careers , and they learn to show up to work on time, to be disciplined, and a lot of them go on to much higher positions, and they have a huge constructive impact on instilling responsibility in a lot of people who were at risk of being left with nothing.
So, I think we all owe a lot to the McDonald's employment culture, and it's not...it's underappreciated.
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