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Musings Report 2019:6 2-9-19 The Hidden Human Cost of Losing Local Mom and Pop Businesses
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The Hidden Human Cost of Losing Local Mom and Pop Businesses
I've been thinking about this article since I happened upon it several weeks ago, as I found it very moving and profound:
In a Tokyo neighborhood's last sushi restaurant, a sense of loss.
"Eiraku is the last surviving sushi bar in this cluttered neighborhood of steep cobblestoned hills and cherry trees unseen on most tourist maps of Tokyo. Caught between the rarified world of $300 omakase dinners and the brutal efficiency of chain-restaurant fish, mom-and-pop shops like it are fast disappearing.
Chef Masatoshi Fukutsuna and his wife, Mitsue, smile without a word. In the 35 years since they opened up shop, the couple has seen many of their friends move away for a job or family, only to return decades later, often without the job or the family, their absence unspoken.
Absence is a part of life here on what remains of the Medaka shopping street, a road so narrow that cars have to drive up onto the sidewalk to let another vehicle pass.
Once the sky turns pink and the sun sets, the street descends into shadow, save for the faintest glow from halogen lamp posts.
It's a neighborhood in twilight. More like it are scattered across this city, their corner cafes and stores far from the neon blare of the famous shopping districts. The number of independent, family-owned sushi bars in Tokyo has halved to 750 in the last decade, a trade association says, driven out of business by fast-food joints and a younger generation that doesn't want to inherit them.
"People would rather pay 100 yen for a plate of sushi at a really cheap place or they'd shell out tens of thousands of yen to go to a famous sushi restaurant in Ginza that they heard about on television," says the chef, absentmindedly changing the channel of the TV. "But places like ours, shops that are right in the middle, we just can't seem to survive."
In the U.S., and presumably elsewhere, there are other financial pressures on small businesses: the complexity of compliance with the ever-increasing thicket of regulations is constantly increasing, as are taxes and fees as local governments seek to extract more revenue from what they view as small-business cash cows.
These increases in costs while revenues sag as customers seek cheaper chain meals or simply stop going out at all are a double-whammy to local eateries.
But look at what's lost in the demise of local small businesses:
-- The loss of neighborhood character and variety, replaced by homogenized chains and lifeless shuttered storefronts.
-- the loss of food that's been prepared by hand with real ingredients.
-- the loss of neighborhood cohesion and social circles; residents who were once recognized as individuals and who belonged to local social circles are unknown in faceless chain outlets.
-- the loss of local employment. Employees in chain outlets commute from distant places, and their hours and locations may change, making it impossible to know local residents.
-- the loss of walkable, interesting neighborhoods. What's there to explore or provide interest in a string of steel and glass chain outlets?
-- the loss of local social gathering places. Once local neighborhood places are lost, people gravitate to McDonald's or similar chain outlets because McDonald's will not hurry customers away from its tables.
In some cultures, the American fast-food outlets are attractive because they are clean, well-lit and class-neutral: they serve every customer with well-trained politeness: the service is as uniform as the food.
The 2013 academic book Food and Culture, A Reader has an interesting essay by Yungxiang Yan about the social and class structure of McDonald's in China: Of Hamburger and Social Space: Consuming McDonald's in Beijing.
The essay helps us understand why Western fast-food outlets have achieved such extraordinary popularity around the world: they provide inviting, uniform social spaces, not just uniform, consistent, reasonable-cost food.
Needless to say, American fast-food outlets are engineered to provide these social-space and class/gender-neutral assets as well as carefully engineered menu selections; in many cultures, McDonald's offers women a safe and acceptable place to gather and socialize. Fast-food outlets are popular with students for similar reasons.
My point here is not to say that fast-food outlets don't serve a positive social role; the point is what fast-food outlets provide is not a 100% replacement for what's lost as local Mom and Pop restaurants vanish.
What cannot be replaced by chains is neighborhood character and variety: once locally owned and operated businesses wither and die, the neighborhood looks like other every other redeveloped, homogenized street around the world.
This is fine for those who want an anonymous, impersonal meal and table, but an anonymous, impersonal meal and table are now available from Beijing to Belfast in a monotonous uniformity of menus and spaces.
What's scarce and thus valuable are not fast-food outlets; what's scarce and valuable are walkable, diverse neighborhoods of locally owned and operated cafes which offer social refreshment and bonds as well as home-cooked meals.
Highlights of the Blog This Past Week
Telltale Signs of Recession 2/8/19
Brace for Impact 2/6/19
China's S-Curve of Expansion, Stagnation and Decline 2/5/19
The Coming Global Financial Crisis: Debt Exhaustion 2/4/19
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Finished and filed our taxes, which as self-employed people ran to 31 pages for the federal tax return. Whew, what a relief to be done with that, and to have over-paid rather than under-paid.
Musings on the Economy: The Unknown Impact of China's Dramatic Slowdown
I have long held that the China Bulls are overlooking the structural fragility of the China Story. This lecture by a Chinese academic economist was quickly censored in China, but a copy made it to servers in the West so we can read it: A Great Shift Unseen Over the Last Forty Years.
I highly recommend reviewing the entire transcript, but this excerpt reveals the depth of China's structural imbalances and precarious levels of speculation and leverage.
"What are our current financial risks? They are hidden, complex, acute, contagious, and malevolent. Structural imbalance are massive, and violations of law and regulations are rampant.
Apart from this financial arbitrage, what do most businesses do with their money? Forty percent of it goes to the stock market, speculation, and buying stocks of financial companies, but not investment into primary business.
Basically China’s economy is all built on speculation, and everything is over leveraged.
Starting in 2009, China embarked on this path of no return. The leverage ratio has soared sharply. Our current leverage ratio is three times that of the United States and twice that of Japan. The debt ratio of non-financial companies is the highest in the world, not to mention real estate.
In the past, international regulations have been favorable to us; we had open access to technology, capital, talent, and markets. Because of the imminent changes we face on the domestic and international fronts, I have titled today’s speech “the great shift unseen over the last forty years.”
Have we really given the problems due consideration? Of course the short-term problem we are looking at is economic decline; the preponderance of data demonstrating this point needs no introduction here. Data concerning performance in November hasn’t been released, but you can extrapolate based on the October figures: there’s been a decline across virtually all sectors, from consumption in retail, autos, or real estate. Just look at China’s exports. Who can say that the trade war didn’t impact China and that China is sure to win the war no matter how big it is? Why don’t the people who were saying this kind of thing in April and May stand by their words now?
Why did we made such mistakes in assessing the international circumstances?
In the four decades following the economic reform, we have undergone five phases of consumption. The first was to solve the food problem, the second was the “New Big Three” [short for refrigerator, color TV, and washing machine], the third was the consumption of information, the fourth was automobiles, and fifth was real estate.
But these five waves have essentially all come to an end. Car sales have dropped sharply and real estate spending is also substantially decreasing, so we are facing serious problems."
The impact of China's 'economic miracle" unraveling is unknown, but since China has been the engine pulling the global economy for the past decade. we should not assume it will have limited consequences.
From Left Field
The Case Against Behavioral Ads Is Stacking Up
Top 3% of U.S. Taxpayers Paid Majority of Income Tax in 2016
Richest in U.S. Have a Few Tricks to Avoid Democrats' Tax Plans
The Super-Rich Are Stockpiling Wealth in Black-Box Charities -- so much for "taxing the rich"....
Everything You Know About Global Order Is Wrong
Over 60, and Crushed by Student Loan Debt: Older Americans are struggling under the burden of student loans—their children’s and their own. -- sobering...
Debt Outstanding by Sector (via the Federal Reserve)
The $247 trillion global debt bomb
250 Trillion in Debt: the World’s Post-Lehman Legacy
Venezuela’s collapse is a window into how the Oil Age will unravel -- well worth reading...
Dear Mr Zuckerberg: the problem isn't the internet, it's Facebook
The Real Legacy of the 1970s: a decade of social and economic turmoil...
"But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over, and around a dyke. It requires the united front of many people to work against it." F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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