“Like the dinosaur, big-box stores have been getting steadily larger. That was handy for devouring smaller competitors, but not much use against insurmountably large and unavoidable problems like asteroids….”
from “Are big box retailers the dinosaurs of shopping …?” (abc.net.au 14th of March 2019).**
If I were a big box retailer in Australia today I would be scared. In fact I would be shaking in my big boxy boots because of the clear and present danger of asteroids and other “insurmountably large and unavoidable problems”, as the ABC news site warns us. An asteroid is a space rock, between 1 metre and 1000km in diameter. That’s one mean customer, to put it in shop-keeping jargon.
I would be worried because, let’s face it, a big box retailer is big and thus presents a bigger target for asteroids screaming in from space hurling themselves against whatever they can find on earth to attack and destroy. Apparently, a really BIG asteroid strike was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Big dinosaurs, big retail premises, what’s the difference to an angry asteroid?
I once worked for a retail shop owner. He sold flowers, plants and gifts in a tiny shop next to the Balmain Hospital in Sydney Australia. He never mentioned the danger of asteroids destroying his shop, but who knows, maybe it preyed on his mind? I’m pretty sure he had a nagging fear of being attacked by Balmain bugs. These are a type of small lobster which inhabits the harbour around Balmain. They are delicious with mornay sauce, sorry, I mean they are vicious with monstrous claws.
Whether it was asteroids, haemorrhoids or crustacean invasion, something was causing him anxiety. He often slept overnight hidden in the shop and emerged ghost-like from behind the counter when I walked into the premises in the morning. Perhaps he slept there because his shop, though tiny, was a smaller target for asteroids than his house which was slightly larger. My job was to travel all over Sydney buying plants for his retail business. Now that I am aware of the dangers I faced from these space killers, I think he kept me on the move to avoid employee extinction by asteroid strike. Just a thought.
But let’s get back to the news item about big box retailers. Let us consider their predicament. Not only are their mega-stores big (like a big box), but they often sell things in big boxes. Fewer and fewer people want to buy big boxes of anything these days. Big boxes of breakfast cereal just go stale or develop weevils unless you’re feeding a small army or a large family, so no-one buys them. Big boxes of light globes just sit there gathering dust because these days LED light globes last far longer than the lifespan of an elephant. Big boxes of batteries eventually go flat. One radio talkback caller recently said he still had boxes of batteries he had stored for the Y2K computer virus crisis in 2000. He said he didn’t need them then and he still doesn’t need them.
But maybe the big box retailers just need to think that they are facing extinction from asteroid attack. If they are convinced this is an urgent problem, they will develop a sense of urgency in all they do and things will improve. I once read a business book that claimed that all companies will wither and die like dinosaurs unless they develop a company-wide culture of urgency. If all employees put a higher priority on the urgent and ignore the important, everything will happen faster, which must somehow improve efficiency and company profits.
If we had a full-scale media beat-up about the urgency of the asteroid threat, this could revolutionize not only the retail sector but also other important industries.
I heard today that education is the fourth biggest export industry of Australia. Education is normally targeted at a country’s own residents, but in Australia, where most of what we earn is from digging things up and shipping them to other countries, the education industry has capitalised on the export potential of school students and tertiary graduates. When they are imported in their raw form, lightly processed in lectures and tutorials, gathered together, packed into air-freight containers and sent back overseas, students generate remarkably high revenues considering that most don’t even come equipped with Bluetooth.
If the education industry could be educated about the imminent danger of asteroids, schools and colleges would get much more urgent and efficient about everything they do. School children could be taught to read and write in weeks not years. I can imagine concentrated high speed lessons in school buses that are driving around erratically to avoid attack from outer space. Simulated asteroid attack drills would build fear and urgency and incentive to study. Students could be urged to sprint between classes instead of dawdling and chattering and socializing. This would save further time and boost efficiency and revenues. The education industry could easily double in size in weeks if urgency about the imminent asteroid problem was promoted in their advertising. Other industries could follow this lead.
Can you see that greater panic concerning asteroids could be the key to solving our economic stagnation problem? Asteroids may indeed be an unavoidable problem but “every problem is a huge opportunity in disguise” as US president John Adams once said, referring, I am sure, to asteroids.
© Geoff Milton 2020
** I am aware of the textual variant that finishes this quote with “unavoidable problems like asteroids or online sales” (my italics), but I think there is a strong argument for omitting these additional words for being at the very least, boring.
