When Bill Harrah, the late founder of Harrah’s Entertainment Inc., held annual meetings at his casinos years ago, he served dinner to shareholders and then lured them to the gaming floor by giving away free poker chips.

Those were the days when annual meetings meant something a way of getting individual shareholders to reinvest in the company. Along the way, they got to meet top executives and sometimes were offered a free meal.

These days, with the proliferation of financial information over the Internet, and investors more likely to buy funds than purchase individual stocks, annual meetings don’t seem to have quite the same impact.

“Basically we try to figure out how many people will show up and then find a place that’s big enough to hold them,” said Babette Heimbuch, chairman and chief executive of FirstFed Financial Corp., the parent of First Federal Bank of California. “It’s about as exciting as that.”

The bank, which will hold its annual meeting this year at Doubletree Guest Suites in Santa Monica, used to get about 200 individual shareholders but that number has dropped to about 50. Heimbuch said most of the individual investors bought the company’s stock when it came public in 1983.

“We try to accommodate our local stockholders but many of them are getting so old they are no longer capable of coming,” she said, noting that large institutions own 70 percent of the bank’s stock.

Though shareholder groups have been active in pushing corporate governance issues, there is no rallying cry for individual shareholders to become more active by attending annual meetings. Moreover, only a handful of companies usually those that are high profile or have stumbled badly have annual meetings that generate high drama.

*


The full version of this story

is available in the March 28 edition of the Los Angeles Business Journal.