Wholesome Reading » Blog Archive

Idle Musings

Still thinking about this bit from the New York Times I quoted yesterday:

“These jobs aren’t coming back,” said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia in Charlotte. “A lot of production either isn’t going to happen at all, or it’s going to happen somewhere other than the United States. There are going to be fewer stores, fewer factories, fewer financial services operations. Firms are making strategic decisions that they don’t want to be in their businesses.”

If this fellow is right, then those jobs aren’t coming back when/as/if the economy gets back on its feet. Yet, those that lost jobs are still going to need to work. Unless we’re assuming that the U.S. economy has just gone on a permanent diet and we’re going to have a large class of permanently unemployed citizens, something has to replace the lost jobs. But what is it? Hovercar production?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Idle Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Idle Musings”

Mike K Says:
March 8th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
“Green” jobs, one would hope. Whatever that means.
Jeff Berardi Says:
March 8th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
As someone who had been involved in retail, I’ll offer a suggestion: Retail that doesn’t suck.

So, I used to work at a major camera retailer in the Northeast (I’m currently laid off, but with the way commissions have been falling off in the past year, collecting unemployment has actually constituted a RAISE for me, so… hooray for that, I guess.). The problem this store faces is simply that, for it to continue to exist, they need to charge more than the major online camera/photo suppliers. Quite a bit more, in fact. When you buy a camera from Amazon, they’re charging you something like 5% above cost. My store can’t possibly exist selling cameras for those kind of margins; the problem is they’ve yet to come up with a sales model that offers the customer a good reason they should pay more to come to our store.

The era of Best Buy is over. The new model is the Apple Store. The store that says, no, we don’t have everything in the world in stock. No, we don’t have the lowest prices. What we have is a beautiful store with employees who actually have some clue as to what they’re talking about, a ton of hands on demos, training, real customer service, etc. No one questions that they’re going to have to pay more at such a store, because it’s obvious the store itself is spending a bunch of money on all this nice stuff they have. It’s not for selling everything to everyone at the lowest possible price, it’s about adding value to a particular group of customers (sounds like a certain baseball publication I gladly shell out $60 a year for, come to think of it). For the people that want to go buy a $300 Dell off Amazon… well… Apple doesn’t stand to make much money off them anyway. For someone who actually needs some help picking out a computer, they’re glad to pay a premium to get some, you know… actual help. Best Buy doesn’t offer any.

So, are the jobs we lost when Circuit City went under coming back? No, never, not gonna happen. The silver lining is that those weren’t very good jobs in the first place. So, lets see if we can’t invent some new products and services that are actually worth paying for. Let’s see if we can get those people laid off from jobs where they stood, bored, at a cash register for hours on end into a business that requires some real application of knowledge and skill, provides more for the customer than just the lowest price, and maybe, just maybe, isn’t a giant ugly box in the middle of an enormous parking lot, and we’ll be a lot better off in the long run. Our current turnips just don’t contain a whole lot more blood, I’m afraid.

Idle Musings

2 Responses to “Idle Musings”

Leave a Reply