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The Antique Mall Theory of Exports
Oct. 5th, 2023 11:10 amIf you go to a McDonald’s and you have fantastic service and the store is clean and you don’t have to wait long and the food is made correctly (like, if you ask for no cheese, there is no cheese) the first time, then you are deep in a recession.
If you got to a McDonald’s and the store is visibly dirty and there’s no TP in the bathroom and there’s a crazy line at the drive thru and you eventually just give up and go to a sit-down restaurant somewhere else entirely, you are in the middle of an Epic Boom.
I’ve had this theory for a while. It’s based on the idea that McDonald’s are Everywhere (so you can test this everywhere) and that McDonald’s pays zero rent for its employees. They pay the least they can get away with, and during a boom, that is not enough to provide good service, keep the store clean, stock TP, etc., because if you paid enough to hire during a boom, you’d have to charge so much that McDonald’s customers could not afford it and stores would have to close.
I’ve been doing Tradle for a minute, and I now have an Adjacency Theory of Exports, which I will henceforth refer to as the Antique Mall Theory of Exports. If you are going to open a retail store, you want to make sure there are customers who can get to your store and that there is not already so much competition for those customers that you will be unable to make a profit. It would _seem_ at first glance that you should place your antique store away from all other antique stores, so that all the customers of antique stores in your area will go to you and not to the other antique stores. But _actually_ antique store shoppers tend to make a day (weekend, etc.) of antique store shopping, so if you put your antique store right next to a successful antique store, both shops will probably do better than if you had decided to go into some other line of work instead.
Entertainingly, this appears to also be true of a lot of other things. You will have noticed that there tend to be clumps of fast food (partly because fast food locations tend to be clustered around things like limited access highway exits). But if you’ve ever been to a Destination Restaurant, the kind of place that doesn’t allow reservations because they know they will always be full no matter what, you will have seen that a cluster of other restaurants pops up around the Destination Restaurant _even if the Destination Restaurant is in an otherwise not very compelling location for a restaurant of its caliber_. You try to go to Dali’s, but you wind up at one of the other places instead and after a while, you go to the Kebab Factory instead, on purpose, because you went there the last couple times and it was so good.
Anyway, when today’s Tradle popped up, I thought, hmmm, this is suspiciously like Niue. I know it’s not Niue — and it’s not _exactly_ like Niue — but it _feels_ like Niue. And indeed, I was within a few hundred miles of the correct location and got it on the second guess (I use maps, but I don’t look up export data — I mention this so you can calibrate the kind of “cheater” I am). And a whole bunch of observations I’ve made over the last few weeks just kinda coalesced into an adjacency theory. I think what happens is that someone makes a go of a new thing, but they have older business, so a neighbor winds up taking on the older business, and it sort of all percolates through the “neighborhood”. If the new business is good enough, and labor is tight enough, you wind up with everyone in the “neighborhood” all doing the same stuff (antique mall). And they’ll tend to move to other new business opportunities either successively or in lockstep, depending on the corporate structures that evolve around the business, and the degree of involvement and cooperation between the local governments and so forth.
If you got to a McDonald’s and the store is visibly dirty and there’s no TP in the bathroom and there’s a crazy line at the drive thru and you eventually just give up and go to a sit-down restaurant somewhere else entirely, you are in the middle of an Epic Boom.
I’ve had this theory for a while. It’s based on the idea that McDonald’s are Everywhere (so you can test this everywhere) and that McDonald’s pays zero rent for its employees. They pay the least they can get away with, and during a boom, that is not enough to provide good service, keep the store clean, stock TP, etc., because if you paid enough to hire during a boom, you’d have to charge so much that McDonald’s customers could not afford it and stores would have to close.
I’ve been doing Tradle for a minute, and I now have an Adjacency Theory of Exports, which I will henceforth refer to as the Antique Mall Theory of Exports. If you are going to open a retail store, you want to make sure there are customers who can get to your store and that there is not already so much competition for those customers that you will be unable to make a profit. It would _seem_ at first glance that you should place your antique store away from all other antique stores, so that all the customers of antique stores in your area will go to you and not to the other antique stores. But _actually_ antique store shoppers tend to make a day (weekend, etc.) of antique store shopping, so if you put your antique store right next to a successful antique store, both shops will probably do better than if you had decided to go into some other line of work instead.
Entertainingly, this appears to also be true of a lot of other things. You will have noticed that there tend to be clumps of fast food (partly because fast food locations tend to be clustered around things like limited access highway exits). But if you’ve ever been to a Destination Restaurant, the kind of place that doesn’t allow reservations because they know they will always be full no matter what, you will have seen that a cluster of other restaurants pops up around the Destination Restaurant _even if the Destination Restaurant is in an otherwise not very compelling location for a restaurant of its caliber_. You try to go to Dali’s, but you wind up at one of the other places instead and after a while, you go to the Kebab Factory instead, on purpose, because you went there the last couple times and it was so good.
Anyway, when today’s Tradle popped up, I thought, hmmm, this is suspiciously like Niue. I know it’s not Niue — and it’s not _exactly_ like Niue — but it _feels_ like Niue. And indeed, I was within a few hundred miles of the correct location and got it on the second guess (I use maps, but I don’t look up export data — I mention this so you can calibrate the kind of “cheater” I am). And a whole bunch of observations I’ve made over the last few weeks just kinda coalesced into an adjacency theory. I think what happens is that someone makes a go of a new thing, but they have older business, so a neighbor winds up taking on the older business, and it sort of all percolates through the “neighborhood”. If the new business is good enough, and labor is tight enough, you wind up with everyone in the “neighborhood” all doing the same stuff (antique mall). And they’ll tend to move to other new business opportunities either successively or in lockstep, depending on the corporate structures that evolve around the business, and the degree of involvement and cooperation between the local governments and so forth.