Together with the many businesses who face a changing way of life, business owners are forced to adopt new methods in order to keep their businesses alive. It is an old story of the past, that eventually a change would come that would move and change the day-to-day business of millions of people. Lots of people are theorizing a war, maybe between the two great power of the United States and China. An economic war, a cyber war, heck, even a space war. But skeptics and the few were left to believe an epidemic could swing through the earth, like pollen in the wind on a warm summer day, and change the social, economic and political scene with the speed of a light switch.
And here we are, looking outside our home windows wondering when our businesses will be re-opened. Here we stand helpless, against the tides of a virus, who forces us to re-think our business, our economic situation, or lives with no warning and time to prepare. This is called ‘game-time’ in sports, where a lot of lessons can be learned via rigorous training, simulating, testing, and planning. You can study a large array of other industries and see hints of systems that could prepare and provide collateral damage support in times of unpredictable change. So what can we do, what take-away can we learn, what are the speculations that the future brings.
Without a crystal ball, it is hard to offer insights to the light that will shine at the end of this journey. Reason being that a different light will shine for most of, guiding us into the new reality that will be born. For us, retail has needed a change since in the 1990s. Consumption, globalism, materialism should have ceased along time ago. The idea to have anything from everywhere, at any time is an old model that was spurred by industrialism continued grip on the world, without wanting to let go.
What you grow, what you build serves the people around you. From farm to table, from workshop to desk. We need to learn to live on the resources we can recruit as a community. We need to consume what we need. Human’s, the social space, the economic model we developed would have never made space to such adoptions in our daily lives. We are too busy consuming, buying wasting to see the impact of our choices. Someone, something decided to give us a hand. Covid-19 is but one of the few firs waves we will see. We must change, or stay behind. The next article will discuss Retail models and the beloved shopping malls whom everybody is declaring dead (spoiler alert, they are not going to die. Well at least not the ones who change).
Alberto Grimme
A true belover in bringing emotions and experience to the people, Alberto's mission is to understand trends and changes before they happen in order to integrate them as part of the projects we design.
