I am here to tell you that the jig is up. We got too many large national chains, too many car makers and too many banks. All pining for the ever shrinking wallet of the US consumer. During the industrial revolution the US had an open field to anyone start working hard or setting up a business. The market was there, people were buying American and the goods were good quality. People took pride in their craftsmanship and quality control. But the success bred the disease of fuckism. It was never enough, bigger was better. Everyone needed more and more and more.... We now have two chains of hardware stores both suffering from the lack of construction and building trades. They are mortal fear of each other. They practice predatory business, i.e. Home Depot is in one area, Loews moves in and the shit hits the fan. Reality is, these two are should be one or one should vanish and close shop, but there is too much monies in their coffers still from killing off the myriads of small ma and pa hardware stores. Thousands, slowly got their life squeezed out of them by one or the other. Same thing with the bookstore chains, BN and Borders....no more indie bookstores, at least not like before.....I predict Border's demise in a few years.... If you do not buy this chain of thought - try staring a new business! I dare you, no I double dare you!! You would just piss your money away! Anything legal is not viable anymore. Someone will squash you and that is guaranteed. How can anyone call this capitalism with a straight face? How can anyone say we are any better than the oligarchs of Russia? Yes we are a richer country with a brainwashed populous who for the most part still believes the system and thinks we have democracy. This is why I do not mind Obama, if not him there would be some other guy trying to save face and keep feeding us bullshit. This crap is not going to change without the dead wait going away.
I understand what you mean. As you scan the shops and malls across you city or state the thought may occur to you, how can all these excuses for businesses stay afloat? Their expenses must be overwhelming and if they don't have the traffic of a BestBuy or WalMart it seems futile. Take chain restaurants; Cheescake Factory, Fridays etc etc etc. of course theres been success for people who've opened their own little diner but I doubt everyone who wants to can compete with the chains and that traffic. Then consider population growth, how is the leap going to find opportunities when millionaire entertainers and atheletes who already make millions a year think they need to start a business that competes with the poor dumb schlep whose just trying to get off the ground not to mention the networking opportunities for Trump, LeBron or Oprah that the schlep doesn't have. Just a rough impression I have that the competition for subsistence is accelerating ...the muthaship of modern business era has launched a long time ago.
I see your point about consumerism in general, but don't you think it would be better if we had 20-30 smaller car manufacturers instead of 3? We've let big business get so big that we can't afford for one to fail. Look at Citi, BA, AIG, GM, GE, etc... Anyone one of these going under will have a huge impact.
In this system what we had , the successful grew big real fast. That is natural - the big fish eats the little fish. A car maker has to be a large business in order to function. The problem is we do not let the big fish die or get hooked, we have more big fish and all the little ones are gone, so now we have to feed the fuckers and they do not serve anyone's interest but their own. But you are right, the Anti trust laws never worked too well the big guys paid off the politikos with their army of lobbyists.
"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried." - Winston Churchhill You could say the same thing about capitalism. If it can be agreed upon that capitalism is the best system then manipulating the system will only cause the problems and symptoms related to capitalism to be much worse. Will a trader be more successful in the long term if he abandons his system when things go bad? Of course not. The downright emotional argument against my statement is that millions of people will lose jobs without massive manipulation of the system. If you study recessions you will realize that the overall percentage of people that lose jobs within a society during a recession is quite similiar when massive manipulation does not occur. Washington is dealing with the problem the wrong way. Washington will make this recession last much, much longer.
Small business guys have it tough. I heard it said that the opportunities in the future will be with those who offer quality & value to their customers (definitely not the same as 'expensive' or 'cheap'). - - I don't know about you guys, but I'm tired of buying crap from China that doesn't work when I first get it or which breaks soon afterwards. It ain't cheap when it doesn't work and when I have to drive back to the store to return it. Maybe we'll start seeing "Made in America" on quality products again someday.
I've always been amazed how many mall and expensive street (think 5th Avenue) storefronts are in a racket of one kind or another. Jewelry, designer this and that, art, you know, garbage masquerading as good stuff. High markup crap. Game over.