tennisball

Tennis ball

by Bob on October 11, 2007

I once asked one of my university students where the nearest Starbucks coffee shop was in a certain neighborhood in New York City.

He responded with alacrity, "Just take a tennis ball, and throw it in any direction, and you will find another Starbucks". Namely, like Korean vegetable stores in NYC, there is one almost every corner in the city.

Hmm. I then realised the significance of the so-called "megastores". They are ubiquitous. They dominate. They has squashed the little store owners and put them out of business.

And I don't think that's a good thing.

Alvin Toffler wrote of the "modular man" in his "Future Shock" book in 1970. That people, workers would be interchangeable and unpluggable and mercenary in the future. That was 1970, thirty seven years ago. He was right.

In these megastores, if you complain to the attendant that something isn't on the shelf, they couldn't care less. They have no allegiance to any particular store. They work for THE overlord company. They move from store to store interchangeably.

It's bad business to shop at a store where the owner doesn't care if you ever come back as a customer. But that's the way it is now for megastores.

And managers of megastores have no say or little say on what is on their shelves for sale. "Planograms" tell them what to put on the shelves. It's all computerized. Inventory, sales, and the like.

We need small single owner stores to keep our societal sanity. It looks like we have lost them and it for the foreseeable future. Sad.