Decline of Mom and Pop Businesses

[pbrower2a]

(03-22-2020, 11:05 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(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.

People are more mobile than they used to be, and that means that people are coming into people that they do not know from the kinship and shared school networks.  With the kinship network one knew enough to not praise any non-plutocratic idea on economics to the banker (even if 'merely' a lending officer or a supervisor of tellers) or suggest to an uncle who worked in "the plant" that right-to-work legislation would solve the high level of unemployment. One knew enough to not get into a heated argument about religion (if you are a Protestant)  with a niece whose brother is a Catholic priest.  You also knew enough not to give Darwin's The Descent of Man and The Origin of Species , let alone Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian* to the young-earth creationist who holds that anyone who believes in evolution will burn in Hell along with serial killers, child molesters, homosexuals, and (paradoxically) both Jews and Holocaust perpetrators -- go figure. You also knew to whom to not show a prospective spouse who has a skin color opposite yours. 

People who know  me well enough know enough to not praise Donald Trump, street drugs, or illicit hustles. As someone who fits three Jewish stereotypes (no, I do not have curly hair or a big nose), it is a bad idea to tell me any antisemitic claptrap.  

In suburbia, which consists of people who live predominately among people from different places and did not know them from childhood, one does not always know what to expect.  


*Anyone who identifies himself as a Christian needs to read that book to establish whether his faith has a solid backing or lacks it. As I once suggested in a philosophy course, anyone whose religious faith can collapse under a challenge of some philosophical exercise either has inadequate faith or has a weak basis for his beliefs.