Green Mountain Coffee: A Giddy Win for Short-Sellers
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Ten years ago, smarting over my tech-stock losses, I should have bought shares of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. Of course, it was the manifest destiny of a Vermont-based outfit to go out and rock the coffee world, Starbucks’ hegemony be damned.
I mean, have you ever met a Vermont coffee snob? They’re hardy people who don impossibly weathered Patagonias held together with carabiners. Something about that tableau should have screamed capitalism to me. Green Mountain stock went from 89 cents in 2002 to a high of $116 last year, before collapsing last week when it announced its weakest sales growth in five years and a profit forecast that was less than Wall Street had expected.