Happy Friday…
If you want to read this on Medium, it’s here.
My tea store closed. Well, not “my” tea store. David’s tea. In the mall. Me, I’m a coffee person. But I used to like to surprise my daughter with tea. Look, cornflower and bergamot! Omg, thanks, Mom!
No more popping into the tea store. A year ago they had 142 stores. Now, they have 18 stores left. Tick tock. For how long?
So many companies are dying.
A collection of weird thoughts again, with a survival guide at the end...
It’s a retail apocalypse out there…
12,600 stores have closed so far. This year. More to come, I’m sure. Brooks Brothers. Chuck E Cheese. GNC. JCPenney. All bankrupt. Poof. Done.
Not to mention the moms and pops and little artisan stores that died.
No one really even counts those, but they die all the same.
The mall by my house is a ghost town. At least 25% of the stores have closed. Windows papered, doors bolted. For rent, the signs say. As if.
All those jobs — gone.
It’s like a retail apocalypse.
Why don’t you shop somewhere else?
Jeff Bezos earns $150,000 per minute. An amazon warehouse worker would need to work 204 years, full time, to earn what Bezos earns in an hour.
In the hour it takes a new Walmart employee to earn the $11 starting wage, the family that owns Walmart earns $4 million.
When I tell people that, some butt-head always pops out of the woodwork to say
“why don’t you shop somewhere else, then?”
Where would you like us to shop, clueless one? Everything is closing. You think C0V1D caused this? No. It just escalated the inevitable.
Bookstores disappeared long before C0V1D. When was the last time you saw a department store that wasn’t a chain? Businesses were dying before, too.
Know why?
Big fish eat little fish…
That’s how it works in nature and we’re part of nature whether we know it or not. It’s not just the stores suffering, my friend. It’s us.
We are also little fish.
In the last 40 years, CEO salaries have gone up 1,007.5%. The salary for workers went up 11% in the same time period.
It’s not like the rise in CEO salaries was driven by stock performance. It’s not. Stock value went up 346% while CEO salaries went up 1759%. See?
(click the chart to enlarge)
How can they do that?
Easy. Pay less. Minimum wage would have to go up 65% just to keep pace with the cost of living. Again — as if.
Stupid vs. uninformed?
As a whole, we are not stupid. But we are uninformed. We see the world falling apart around us, and what do we say?
Ok, boomer.
And boomers retort that young people are lazy and if they “worked hard” like “they” did, they’d be fine. Wrong again, Sam.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
People have been whining about other generations since Aristotle commented on it. It’s not helpful, and it’s not even new.
You think boomers are the problem? Or millennials?
No. Greed is the problem. 26 billionaires own more money than half the world. They don’t care if you can pay your bills or if you have to choose between rent or groceries. They don’t care if their employees need food stamps to exist.
They pay what the law tells them they have to.
Are you starting to see the problem?
We need to take off the blinders.
Greed is not an age.
How do we dig out of this mess?
People talk about getting back to “normal” as if there’s a normal to go back to. There’s not. The system was slowly imploding. C0V1D just sped it up.
The big fish were always going to eat the little fish.
So how do you dig out of the mess?
Do what the smart little fish do. Find a tiny spot in the ecosystem that can feed you. One where the big fish aren’t swimming around looking for who to eat next. A space that’s too small for them.
Stop being the small fish in a big pond and be the big fish in your own pond.
There’s no time better than now to chase that dream.
And learn marketing.
Not the hawking, shouting kind. I promise you, that’s the least effective way. Why did you think they shout so loud? Trying to be heard, that’s why.
The really good marketers? They just quietly make a living. Real marketing is communication. Finding your people. Building something for you, that means something to you.
You’re the only person who will never lay you off.
As they say, you only need 1000 true fans to make a living.
The best time to start finding them was a year ago.
The next best time is now.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” —Albert Einstein
This week’s reading:
My readers are why I keep writing. Hope you’ll read one of these;
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Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.
:)
Linda
P.S. If there’s something you’d like me to write about, hit reply and let me know.