Survival of the fittest

The workplace for a lot of people isn't a corporate tower or branch office or career ladder to climb. For many, the workplace is a smaller, more familial place. Sometimes it is family.

Many of these small, independent businesses are like the Shop Around the Corner, the children's bookstore owned and operated by Meg Ryan's character in the movie You've Got Mail. The shop is nurtured and loved by her three employees and loyal customers -- until a Fox books megastore opens around the corner.

I apologize for outlining the plot if you haven't seen the movie. Suffice it to say that you might want to pledge to patronize a small business, any small business, anywhere. The entrepreneurial spirit is a wondrous thing. It sends people pioneering across continents, bares them to great financial and emotional risk, and often provides the research and development seeds from which progress grows. It also provides jobs, more than all the Fortune 500 types combined. Mergermania among the big guys, blocklong discount stores and far- flung chain operations have their place. I like them a lot, for some reasons -- mostly financial. Yet I can't wriggle out of a guilty hair shirt. Too often, I don't drive a bit farther or spend a bit more to patronize the little guy, the one who provided an item or a service for years before the megamerchants' demographic studies pinpointed the neighborhood as a hospitable place. We shouldn't let the winsomeness of stars Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks and the happy-ever-after ending erase the real-life outcomes of comparable tales. Going-out-of-business sales and quiet disappearances from the economic landscape happen every day when small independents can't compete. On the same day I saw You've Got Mail, I saw a store-closing notice for the cozy Zoom toy store at 119th and Roe in Kansas City. "You're wondering if it's because of the Zany Brainy?" responded Zoom owner John Middelkamp, referring to the bigger chain store that opened this fall nearby. Actually, Zoom's lease was up, and Middelkamp didn't dare commit to the three-year renewal, even though Zoom's 1998 sales were the best ever -- until November and December, that is. When Zany Brainy opened, "we did feel an effect." It was, Middelkamp said, too soon to know whether Zoom could compete in the long run. Fear that it couldn't prevailed, though. Hard-nosed business types will say that's the way it goes. The fittest survive. The ones who don't adapt, who don't fill a needed niche, will fail. Maybe so. So I itch under the hair shirt worn for not patronizing independents. It is, perhaps, penance for the future. Every time a small business fails, I sense a backward stumble to the days of Henry Ford, who didn't care what color car his customers wanted, as long as it was black. With every merger, every chain store opening that supplants an independent, some element of choice is lost. Most failed independents don't end up in the arms of the megastore millionaire. And no matter how likable the Goliath, the loss of another David rips a tiny hole in a rich economic tapestry.

Copyright 1999
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