2016: How is the Nebraska Furniture Mart's new store in Dallas, TX doing?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good afternoon, Mr. Buffett.

WARREN BUFFETT: Hi.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Shawn Montgomery (PH) from Fort Worth, Texas. The Nebraska Furniture Mart has been open for about a year in Dallas.

WARREN BUFFETT: Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was just curious how sales have been, how they compare to your other stores, and what you think they’ll be in the future. Thank you.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. It’s our largest store in volume. But we had a problem there that we had in Kansas City, and we’ll probably have every time we open a store, in that we generate so much initial volume that we had a delivery problem. Like I say, it was worse in Kansas City — that was the first one we opened.

So we really had to take our foot off the gas pedal because the last thing in the world we want to do, you know, is make first impressions with delivery problems — accompanied by delivery problems.

So, it’s our largest store in volume. The deliveries have gotten far better. They actually are meeting our company standards that we have in Omaha.

But that wasn’t the case for some months. And it’s hard to go open up — we opened up the largest home furnishing store in the United States, and we did it in an area where we naturally thought we trained the drivers as well as we could and everything.

But delivery with 100-plus units out there in a new operation, you know, taking in carpet and people getting lost and routing being bad and all kind — there was plenty of work to be done. And it’s been done.

So I expect that store, which already is the largest store we have, but I think it’ll be a billion-dollar annual store before very long. We’re getting ready to step on the gas. It’s a terrific area.

We have 20-plus auto dealerships there in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. We probably have three or four of them in the area where our Furniture Mart is. They can’t build fast enough down there. Toyota’s moving there. Lexus.

It’s going — it already is a great store, but it’s going to be something even far beyond that.

We’ve opened up about — I think there are about four food places so far. We’ve got four or five more in the works. And they’re doing terrific volumes.

I’m starting to sound like Donald Trump here, you know, tremendous, terrific, you know, fantastic, I’ve never seen anything like it. (Laughter)

Just wait until next year. I’ll come back, I’ll really be in shape then.

It’s doing well. We couldn’t have picked a better area. We have 400 and — have over 400 acres that we were very fortunate in corralling a whole bunch of land, and we’re bringing prices and variety like they — nobody’s seen. And now we’ve just got to bring in delivery like nobody’s ever seen.