Warning: I have a cold. One of those hacking cough colds where you tend to leave piles of used tissues with unmentionable substances in them on the bedside table. Part of this cold includes me waking up in the middle of the night to cough, and once awake, habitually checking the news. So no, maybe I shouldn't have checked Bloomberg at 3am, but I did. And I read a single line in a single story about retail store closings that freaked me out and pissed me off so much that I needed to vent about it somewhere.
The line in the story was this:
Probably 50,000 stores could close without any effect on consumer choice, Gregory Segall, a managing partner at buyout firm Versa Capital Management Inc., said this month during a panel discussion held at Bloomberg LP’s New York offices.
Now to be fair to Bloomberg, the story itself was on how many retail stores will likely close in the next couple of years, and the number is a lot bigger than 50K...
The ICSC predicts, using U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, that 148,000 stores will shut down in 2008. That would be the largest number since 151,000 closings in 2001, during the last recession, according to ICSC Chief Economist Michael Niemira. The total number of retail establishments will decline by about 3 percent this year, also taking into account locations that were opened, he said. The U.S. had 1.11 million retail locations in 2002. Another 73,000 locations may shut their doors in the first part of 2009, Niemira said.
And lest we forget, even prior to the meltdown, retailing in the US wasn't doing all that well in the first place, thanks to a number of factors including the increasingly crappy economy combined with people increasingly buying online.
But that's not the point of my freakout. The point of my freakout is that some asshat LBO jerkoff thinks that consumers will begin to lack choices after 50K stores close. I just cannot get my mind around the whole ecology of this idea. It makes my brain hurt. We, the holy American consumers, who, it must be said, share in the responsibility for creating this economic monster we are now being eaten by, have to have our choice preserved. I don't know about you, but most folks I know haven't been feeling they've got much in the way of choices lately about buying anything, let alone where they can buy it. Their choices have been pretty limited to "can afford it or can't".
And if we're going to be really honest about consumer choices, wouldn't it be interesting to see what kind of consumer choices we had in our local neighborhoods before Walmart showed up? Walmart sure isn't suffering in this recession, as the Bloomberg article points out:
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Retailing Index has shed 34 percent this year, with only two of its 27 companies rising. The index doesn’t include Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, which fell 24 cents to $55.11 at 4:02 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Wal-Mart shares have gained 18 percent this year.
You think Walmart cares about consumer choice? You think they ever did?
And what about those 148,000 closing stores' employees who lost their jobs this year? Yes, they were crappy jobs with no benefits. And yes, these folks too are victims of an economy addicted to consumption. But the jobs obviously provided some income, probably along with other jobs these same folks needed to hold down simultaneously. What happens to them? You think they care about their consumer choice suffering? I think most are wondering how they can find a decent job that helps them actually provide a livelihood for themselves and their families.
I'm rambling...blame it on the cold medicine. But for fuck's sake if we don't start thinking of our economy in terms other than the consumer we're done for. We really are. We have to PRODUCE. We have to MAKE STUFF -- preferably renewable stuff and sustainable stuff and stuff that shows off how fucking smart we are. Stuff like this:
Ballard Library, Seattle. It's a state-of-the-art green building which makes use of a sod roof, daylighting, and translucent thin-film solar collectors.
or this:
Chevrolet Equinox Fuel Cell Vehicle
or this:
The Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory
I'm resolved that my choice as an American consumer in 2009 is to buy less AND make more. Thanks for reading.