The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

I've maintained for a while that Big Box stores and national chain retail do not have a bright future in the clusterfuck economy and that they will tank with remarkable swiftness sooner rather than later.

Yesterday I popped into a Staples store by happenstance -- well, the fact is we don't have an office supply store downtown anymore. These days, that means computers, and I was in search of a universal BUS hub for mine so I could hook up a new digital camera without unhooking my zip drive. The Staples is located in a "power center" strip mall two miles north of Saratoga in what was previously the little farming township of Wilton, which has exploded, since 1975, into a spewage of strips, fried food huts, and cul-de-sac dwelling bunkers.

It was at once obvious that this store was staffed by a skeleton crew. With some difficulty I found a clerk who was free to help me find the item. He was man in his forties with -- I'm not saying this merely in hindsight -- an unbalanced gleam in his eyes. But I didn't think more of it just then, and I followed him down an aisle to the computer accessories. I was examining two different models in their plastic theft-guard trappings, trying to make out what the power supply unit amounted to, and asking the clerk questions, when he grabbed the modems away from me and more or less tossed them back onto the bottom of the rack. He seemed to do this out of impatience and consternation, as if I was taking up an unpardonable amount of his time. Then he marched away.

I was pretty amazed by this, of course. I followed him to the back of the store and asked his name. By this time, I was close enough to read his plastic name badge. It said Buzz _______." He noticed me reading it so he stepped forward, holding the badge out from his shirt so as to assist me reading it (and demonstrate his fearlessness of customer wrath). I asked him what the hell was going on. He simply said, "I'm not helping you anymore, sir. Go find someone else."

So I did, But not before I asked to see the manager ( he was at lunch), and/or the assistant manager (he wasn't coming in that day). Anyway, I ended up not buying one of their modems largely because I'd decided that I didn't want to give Staples another nickel in my lifetime. On my way back to the house, I stopped at Radio Shack to see what they had in BUS hubs. They're most recent campaign was to plant in the customers' minds the idea that they are now the place to go for computer stuff. Guess what. They didn't have a BUS hub and the clerk said they never carry them. So, I made up my mind to get the damn thing from a catalog or on-line.

The point of all this is that my dreary experience in big box land yesterday was not the exception. More and more, as the credit overhang totters, and less "money" is spent by "the consumer," these national retail operations desperately attempt to maintain profitibility by cutting one of their only variable costs: store clerk salaries. They are now down below the bare minimum in staff needed to leave many customer with anything but a negative impression of being there. And, of course, this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop, because the more they cut down on service, the less business they are apt to generate, and so on.

This curious predicament may or may not be extrinsic to the other forces now gathering to drive them out of business -- and to do so mercilessly when the time comes -- it it can only hasten their demise. National chain retail is based on economies of scale that require the company to move immense amounts of stuff vast distances at very narrow profit margins. If anything changes in their business equation, those profits vanish. Right now, the two factors causing distress to the national chains are the price of gasoline for trucking and the price of natural gas for heating and electricity (i.e. air conditioning this time of year).

This should remind us that systems failure can occur when even part of a complex system fails only partially, a law which applies to virtually all the complex systems that comprise the clusterfuck economy.

The difficult part for the nation is that when the national chains go down swiftly, their places will not be as swiftly reoccupied by operators doing business at lesser scales -- that is, by local small business -- because the chains have killed off a generation of small business people and the skill and knowledge needed to do it has been lost. In the retail world of smaller locally-owned stores, this knowledge and skill was traditionally transmitted through families, as children took over their parents' business. The reorganization of retail commerce in Clusterfuck Nation is going to be a harsh and difficult assignment. Prepare for a world of less shopping.