Decline of Mom and Pop Businesses

[beechnut79]

(03-21-2020, 08:45 PM)I pbrower2a Wrote:

(03-21-2020, 09:27 AM)sbarrera Wrote: I think it's mostly about c.) convenience. People's priorities shifted to getting what they want and getting out, not to staying and chatting and making friendships. In other words, business stopped having a community orientation and became strictly about fulfilling individual needs. It also comes out of the growth of the world economy and global supply chains - it all just favors the bigger enterprises, who are ready to cater to the demands of the hyper-consumer.

At least, that's how it was before 2020.

The quarantine in several states (including California, Illinois, Michigan, and New York) could make life lonely and frustrating for the duration. People are going to miss much of what they put on hiatus. Every generation will treat the quarantine differently and get a different impression of it. Was it necessary, people will ask after the fact? Who knows?  

In any event the model that depends upon people finding meaning in buying "crap at Big Box-Mart" will itself get stale. Fads go that way as a rule. It may be ironic, but "Big Box Mart" put people in contact with each other. Deficiency became surfeit, but at the least, planning and saving to get some big-ticket item (which is how people did things in the 1950's) that one examined for its merits gave people some purpose -- and a longer time-frame.

"Get it now!" may not be so attractive when it involves the complexity of d--t, which will be about as dirty a word as f--k in a few years.

I am tempted to believe that people will seek chatting that can lead to friendships. Buying more stuff? That has lost its appeal when much of what one bought with the feeling that one was an astute shopper if one bought it becomes clutter that makes life uglier and more complicated. 

Ice-cream socials, potluck dinners, pool parties? Those will be back in vogue as America goes forward to a time more analogous, if not quite the same, to the 1950's.  All of those will be pay-as-you-go.

The thought for the day is that meeting new and interesting people fosters stimulating conversations and new ways of doing things. Yet today’s more uptight world tends to discourage such, since you have to be mindful of blurting something out that might offend someone. You and I as fellow Aspies tend to be doubly prone to such backlash. We have become much more sensitive and insensitive at the same time. As a result social distancing was well underway even before the pandemic hit.

I find it interesting the things you feel might come back into vogue, which does tie into to this post’s open. In my intro to this thread I much recall how much easier to initiate said convos in the old individually owned shops of bygone times. Many could even be friends first and business people second. And while the underlings still had a boss they had to answer to, I doubt that they were monitored every minute like in today’s corporate business world.