I remember my six days a week… I remember walking to the subway stop in winter with my wet hair feeling it frozen against my head as I waited on the Union Turnpike subway platform in Kew Gardens, a little neighborhood in Queens New York where I grew up heading to work at the greatest music store the world ever did and ever will know, -Manny’s …
I remember asking, “Can I help you?” “Do you need any help?” “That’s a really nice (fill in the blank)”.
I remember helping Will Smith, and eating pizza with him… I remember Pauly Shore… Rupert Holmes (do you like Pina colladas)..Luther Vandross, LL Cool J, James Taylor, Billy Joel, John Entwhistle, and backstage passes to Prince and many more… I remember helping people with their dreams, as many of the customers I had were not famous at the time but became so…
I can remember being 12 years old at Radio Shack in Oakland CA, putting fuses and radio thingies on the walls, in perfect serial number order. I can remember cleaning dog **** off the floor at a motorcycle shop also in California. Radio Shack and the motorcycle store didn’t pay money, but what I learned in experience and responsibility has paid handsomely over the years….
So I thought retail might be a good area to take a look at, in kind of a “state of the union”… surprisingly many of the stocks in the retail sector have held up surprisingly well, and not only have they not gone down, but they have actually made new all-time highs, -these would be primarily in the specialty retail sector.
These are companies like whole foods market (wfmi), Starbucks coffee (sbux). While we have owned these stocks in the past, getting individual clients trained to weather out the dips is just as difficult a proposition that we find ourselves in with customers who are short, and must weather out the rallies… bull or bear riding takes endurance, most investors don’t have.
I suppose a proper analysis of whole foods market and Starbucks coffee would lead me to believe that just as the American consumer has a pathologic need to satisfy his/her material object lust at any cost even on credit…
So to is the Americans desire to treat him herself with the finer things that all that borrowed money from around the world can buy… imported cheeses… fine coffees… Holland tomatoes… etc etc we seem to be a society of people who feel they need to make up for all the emptiness they feel inside… by “shopping”…
Deep Thoughts…
We recently had some friends visit us from New York, he’s a photographer that I met ten years ago or so while doing publicity photos… and she is a magazine editor for a New York magazine… they stayed with us for almost two weeks… we loved every minute of their company. In one of our late-night chats we spoke about money… we spoke about fulfillment… we spoke about striving… and all that entails… and we discovered some very interesting things together….
Most of us “Have to be” meaning that most of us feel that by, having… that car… that house… that woman/man… that summer house… that amount of money… that then we will be…. Happy –
We discovered in our discussions that this was probably the wrong way to go about things…. We discovered in our discussions that most of us have this all in reverse. And so our “achievements/attainments” are empty victories at best because when we have “them”…. We were not happy first.
We discovered in our discussions that it would be far better to be happy and do “works” and then have… and we agreed that this was a far better formula for lasting satisfaction… Because as we all know … I hope! The happy moment when you buy something only lasts on a moment, and then it is gone, and then mistakenly we go back to the retail catalogs, to the mall’s, back to the Amazon’s, and we repeat the same mistake over and over again with money we can’t afford, and no lasting happiness… in the end … we feel “ripped off”
BE HAPPY FIRST…. DO GOOD WORKS… HAVE THE LIFE YOU WANT…
Back to an analysis of the retail sector of the economy… it seems that the retail sector has Wal-Mart on the one hand doing some 250 billion plus per year, and on the other hand up-and-coming specialty retailers like Coldstone Creamery (private) Panera Bread (PNRA)… there seems to be little room for the middle …
If you want discount, you go to Wal-Mart … if you want discount “chic”/”specialty” you go to Costco or BJ’s or Sam’s Club(also Walmart)… and if you want specialty you go to Starbucks coffee, Panera Bread, Whole Foods Market. If there is some specialty electronics or appliance you want you are just as likely to go to an online price hound like mysimon.com and find the best possible price amongst hundreds of retailers…
With all our eazzy credit Americans have never had so many ways to convert their cash to items destined for garage sales and the garbage. And considering this binge has been going on for some time the question I ask my self is “just how many television sets, do I really need ?” -fill in the blank
In the last 10 years retail space in the United States has more than doubled. Consider this while I don’t have exact figures I would doubt the total population of human beings in the United States has more than doubled in the last 10 years, therefore my conclusion would be there are simply too many material gratification outlets, I’ll call them “stores”/shoponcreditaholic… inevitably something has to give… because like all addictions in the end it simply is “no fun anymore”.
So I answer the question “ how much is that Gorilla in the window” … take my advice, at any price , a thing from the window won’t make you happy at any price…. Be happy first… then get the gorilla , and be happy together… you and the gorilla
*Oh and we got more short today! -dv
By: Damon Vickers
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