Big Seven Accountants? It Just Doesn’t Add Up
The list of Big Eight accounting firms is shrinking by one, robbing another memorable phrase from a business lexicon that has already lost the Seven Sisters oil companies and the BUNCH computer makers.
Two Big Eight members, Arthur Young & Co. and Ernst & Whinney, announced Friday, as expected, that they agreed in principle to merge into the world’s largest accounting agency. The new company, to be called Ernst & Young, will have 70,000 employees and $4.3 billion in revenue.
Traditionalists were swallowing hard at the loss of the athletic-sounding Big Eight to refer to the nation’s biggest accounting firms.
“This has got people buzzing,” said Arthur Bowman, editor of Bowman’s Accounting Report in Atlanta. The phrase Big Eight is dead because no other firm deserves membership, he said. Big Seven is still hard on the ears, he noted, but then, “This isn’t a football conference.”
The ever-changing face of corporate America is erasing one handy phrase after another.
Seven Sisters ceased to work as a term for the world’s largest oil companies in 1984 when one of them, Gulf Corp., was swallowed by another, Standard Oil Co. of California, now Chevron Corp.
The BUNCH is no longer a good acronym for rivals to International Business Machines Corp., since the B bought the U, the H got out of computers and the C has shrunk drastically.
(B was for Burroughs Corp.; U for Univac, later Sperry Corp.; N for NCR Corp.; C for Control Data Corp. and H for Honeywell Inc.)
The Fortune 500 biggest industrial companies and the Forbes 400 richest Americans won’t be outdated because they accommodate an ever-changing membership. The same goes for the Dow Jones average of 30 industrial stocks.
The endangered monikers are those with fixed memberships.
Big Three means less than it once did for auto makers and television networks. The auto makers are losing ground to Japanese auto plants in the United States; the networks face competition from cable and such would-be “fourth networks” as Fox Broadcasting Cos.
Big Eight had an unusually long lineage. Bowman said the firms were identified when the Securities and Exchange Commission was created in the 1930s, and Fortune magazine popularized the term in the 1960s. The cutoff point made sense because No. 8 was more than twice the size of No. 9.
