fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6062 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6062 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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["The Carnival of the Animals" by Camille Saint-Saëns]

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06. [SPOILERS for Marvel Secret Invasion]

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07. [SPOILERS for Star Trek Discovery]

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08. [WARNING for discussion of transphobia]

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09. [WARNING for discussion of abuse]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #866.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Great small businesses run by weird people who constantly complain about customers but also refuse to do things like keep regular hours or update their menus is good. That's the way it's supposed to be. This is the way this is the truth.

The lady in question isn't weird, though, so spinning like it's some delightful quirk instead of a poor business practice that's likely harming your livelihood is... interesting. Funnily enough, a lot of people want to spend their money on businesses who 1) have product to sell and 2) are open.

Stores should be able to stay open even if they have poor business practices

??? No? Stores are not a government service that people need to live. Who's gonna give a bad business the money to stay open? If it's a restaurant, does the farmer who makes the food HAVE to give it to them for free because the restaurant owner can't be bothered to keep regular hours? Does the power company have to give them free electricity because the restaurant owner can't be bothered to keep regular hours? Do you want all of that to be paid for out of our taxes? Cause that's how you get Elon Musk.

Absolutely not. Maybe being a business person is not the right job for you....

It should be possible for businesses to cover their nut and stay open even if they don't have good business practices. It's good that small businesses shouldn't have to rely on maximizing efficiency and that there should be enough space and latitude for people to operate their stores like that. And if businesses don't have to be maximally efficient to stay open, that also means that you can have a much wider range of types of businesses that might not be profitable otherwise, and things that are charming and quirky and weird. That's good.

Nope. PEOPLE should still be able to live even if their businesses fail. But we should not be expending resources that would be best utilized in other ways. If you're a bad restaurateur and your produce that could be feeding people is going bad because you can't be bothered to keep regular hours, you should not be able to get that amount of produce anymore.

Obviously, people shouldn't let produce go to waste. Of course I'm not advocating that. But what I am saying is that it should be easy for small businesses to stay in business. Small businesses should not have to operate at the maximum peak of efficiency to stay open. That doesn't mean that they should waste food, obviously. But basically, for any given business, there is some way of running that business that is the most profitable.

If you want to open a restaurant in a given town, there's an optimal way to run that restaurant - there's a specific combination of cuisine, menu, style of cooking, hours, decor, atmosphere, service, etc that will bring you the most profit. And what I'm saying is that it's bad to arrange a socio-economic system that requires businesses to operate as close to maximum efficiency as possible. It is spiritually bad and it is boring.

Give you another example: bookstores. I would personally much rather live in a world where someone can own a bookshop and stock it with books that they are passionate about and they think other people can be passionate about, even if those books aren't as new or as well-known or as popular. But that is clearly not the most efficient way to run a bookstore. It is an abysmally bad way to run a bookstore from a business point of view. I think it should be economically feasible for bookstores to stay open doing that anyway, even if it's not the most economically effective way of selling books, because it's better.

AYRT

If someone has the resources to treat a business as their own passion project, fine. Go ahead. But returning to the whole point of this thread, don't complain that you don't make enough money when you can't be bothered to be open. Don't expect US to subsidize your hobby.

Okay, so who do you think should pay to keep those bookstores in business? Because I sure as hell don't want my taxes funding something like that.

Nope, there is no should about it. If a store can sell enough product to make a profit over its costs than it may succeed. Some stores can do that with irregular business practices because they are filling a niche in the market. Some cannot. Saying that a store 'should' be able to stay open with irregular business practices is saying that consumers should spend their money at stores that provide a substandard experience for them, solely to keep them open. Which is ridiculous.

In your bookstore example, random people off the street would be expected to buy books they do not like or want to keep your 'passionate' bookstore owner afloat, if there otherwise was not a market for what they wanted to sell. Even if those customers actually wanted other books, books that the bookstore owner wasn't passionate about so didn't stock. Even if another bookstore stocked the books those customers really wanted. How is that okay?

Business owner here and nah. It's disrespectful to your customers - aka the people giving you money for your products/services - to not follow good business practices. You can't expect people to patronize your business if you give them lousy service.

Lol. No.

I am so far ahead of the curve on this one no one else can even see me

If you're able and willing to subsidize business that would otherwise not be able to support themselves, then go for it. I'm not sure how you can possibly make that work, otherwise.

I'm not talking about subsidizing them. I'm mostly talking about rent being cheap again.

DA

What does rent have to do with being a shit business owner?

Cheaper rent is a big help to small business owners, but it's hardly the only issue that makes running and sustaining a small business a challenge. If you don't keep your inventory up to date and in stock, that's not going to be solved by cheaper rent. If you fail to keep regular hours, that's also got nothing to do with cheaper rent.

Not to mention you haven't said how this rent is supposed to suddenly get cheap, if not a subsidy of some kind.

If you don't sell anything because you're never open when people want to shop or you don't stock what people want to buy, it doesn't matter how cheap your rent is. Your business is still going to fail. There are many things that are, but that is not an immoral failing of capitalism.

[ SECRET POST #6062 ]

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