Noreena Hertz

In her recent new book on the epidemic of loneliness afflicting society in the 21st century, “The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World that’s Falling Apart” scholar and commentator Noreen Hertz surveys the trends that alienate us from our neighbours and loved ones.

They include:

- The pace of modern urban life
- Convenience and contactless shopping
- Screen addiction, more specifically the screens of our cellphones
- Trends in work environment
- The gig economy
- Automated assistants, robots, and sex appliances
- The rapid decline of neighbourhood stores and social clubs

Little of this I hadn’t read elsewhere, but some of these subjects I continue to give some thought to, particularly the closing of independent retailers along the main streets of city neighbourhoods.

I think about it because I own businesses on main streets in city neighbourhoods.

Here is how Hertz sees it:

“If we are to feel part of a community rather than simply live in isolated bubbles we must appreciate the role local entrepreneurs play in binding us together.”

What exactly is the role entrepreneurs — and by this I think she means independent retail operators — play in binding us together that local schools, churches, parks, street festivals, local elections, charity events, sports clubs, and the bus stop don’t already accomplish?

What I see is that local business complements things that are already happening:

- We congregate at the local grocery store, the hair salon, the yoga studio, the veterinarian, and the dentists’ offices much as we do at the schoolyard or hockey arena.
- We run for expertise to the local hardware store, the computer store, the local bank branch, and the shoe repair centre.
- We get away from ourselves at the fashion store, the furniture outlet, and the private gym.

Many of these goods and services can be filled by franchises of national or international brands like Starbucks. It looks like they will be part of neighbourhoods for the foreseeable future.

The kinds of businesses Hertz idealizes are the neighbourhood restaurants, the old fashioned shoe shops, clothing stores, and ice cream parlours.

We know from our experience that high commercial rents, property taxes, competition from online retailers, suburban malls and supercentre outlets, and the aging of our population all contribute to the decline of commerce on our main streets.

Now, here are some of the trends I see that you, perhaps, don’t:

- The sky-high expectations of consumers. Big box has taught consumers to expect perfect satisfaction, open-ended timelines and conditions for returning unsatisfactory merchandise, and open-ended customer service to explain, dissect, and support customer choice.
- The proliferation of communications media. Today business is bombarded not only by the demands of customers in person or over the telephone, but through texting, e-mail, facebook, instagram, google, and innumerable other communications media. Keeping up with these media is costly and not always resulting in a net contribution to the business.
- The expectations of employees. Especially young employees see the dollar wage as the be all and end-all of their compensation. Many businesses — the gig economy businesses excepted — pay up to six or eight government mandated benefits to their employees that nobody counts. People have a right to expect a liveable wage, but what constitutes a liveable wage may not jibe with what is probable in the real world of competition, and the pressure of overheads in the urban retail environment.
- The pressure on prices of online merchants worldwide and the pressure of infinite choice that no local merchant can possibly replicate.
- Brand loyalty. The preference consumers give to accepted international brands over niche or local brands. By and large customers have little time to make a purchase decision in the midst of wide choice, limited resources, and limited attention span. The decision which requires the least energy and evaluation is often the handiest. No merchant can be ignorant of the pull of brands. The other side of this formula is that along with the huge pull of the brand comes the public information about how much those products should cost, a price widely known and immoveable in the customer’s eye. Independent merchants are flirting with disaster if the public perceives him/her to be above Internet pricing.
- Financial service charges. Credit card companies have brainwashed customers into believing there is a game to be won with credit card points, cards that cost merchants anywhere from 2% to 6% of the gross value of receipts. Take that off the top of 95% of the merchant sales.
- Rationalization of logistics and the supply chain. Premium products simply do not appear in the marketplace unless mass merchants will it to be there. Much as independents complain of the pull of the national merchants, many of the products they would like to sell wouldn’t appear in their regional market unless the large merchants order pallets of those products. The manufacturers don’t like to ship less than pallets and the distributors don’t like to break open pallets. And neither want to see returns of defectives or open packages. In this system it is brutally difficult for independents to consistently stock products people actually want to buy. The manufacturers know this. They prefer the largest dealers not necessarily because they sell more (per sq.ft. of retail space) but because the larger dealers share the warehousing costs and financing of products that will ultimately be discounted. Or, worse, sent to landfill.
- Constraints of working capital. In an ideal world, merchants earn enough profit on goods and services and don’t make costly mistakes. They know what the customer wants and sells it to them. Goods sell and the cash available to the merchant grows consistently and predictably. But in the real world, we make mistakes. We pay too much for rent, or we buy stuff people don’t want, or a competitor comes along and discounts our most profitable item. Losses eat away at our working capital.
- Gentrification. Rising housing costs and the loss of affordable rentals make it difficult for all businesses to hire people who live near their place of work. The fewer locals there are who work in these stores, the less accountable these stores are to their neighbours.

And where do you go when working capital shrinks? When I ran a very small business it was relatively easy to hide minor mistakes by using a credit card to fill a hole in cash flow. You can’t do this for very long if you have a larger business with many employees, leases, and taxes to pay. There is less and less slack in the system to make up when things go sour. Independents with no personal capital or resources — such as equity in a home — have almost nowhere to go.

With all respect to people who want independent business to survive, they must understand that these are factors upon which independents have no control.

Let me say this again, only more clearly: THE BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT IS SAVAGE, UNFORGIVING, AND LARGELY OUTSIDE OF ANYBODY’S CONTROL.

And not all entrepreneurs are on the main streets. People run boutique businesses from their homes and use the big subsidy of low residential taxes and “contractors” to make a go of it.

Add on top of this the conditions of a pandemic and you have a recipe of disaster for most independent businesses.

Will tax subsidies fix this? I’m not convinced.

Employment programs? Too short term.

Will local residents vote in town councillors who will raise taxes high enough to reduce the tax burden on independent business? Not in my lifetime.

Some of the measures I think could help independents in the medium term:

- Credit merchants for merchant fees paid on value added taxes.
- Encourage big business to patronize local independents
- Educate parents on what it means when they prey on local businesses to subsidize boutique charities like school fundraisers. I have heard some parents go so far as to blacklist uncooperative local businesses.
- Reward customers for good behaviour not for purchasing behaviour
- Charge online buyers for the additional overhead on those extra courier trips on our public streets
- Make all employers pay employment taxes or none of us, but don’t penalize merchants who under tax law must define employees as such
- Increase neighbourhood security and make it safer for our people to work in stores
- Re-educate employees on the meaning of their pay packages

All of this should not minimize the fact that not everybody who considers them self an entrepreneur is really cut out for it.

Success in business is a fleeting thing. There never has nor ever will be a guarantee of success. It takes knowledge, skill, daring, perseverance, working capital, and a willingness to lose. Then more than a little good fortune. Lastly, good businesses have found ways to routinize winning transactions, not the one offs, not the home runs, but many boring transactions over the long term.

There is a role for independent retailer in the neighbourhood landscape, but it will never succeed without the cooperation of the transnationals, not in this environment.

We need the cooperation of big businesses to make little business survive in this environment. This combination of market forces will if not rejuvenate neighbourhoods, help keep them going.… (meer)

The author discusses loneliness and indicates that this problem has been growing in this century. She adds to this the recent impact of the COVID pandemic. I found the discussion of the health impact of loneliness interesting and surprising. I found the discussion of politics and business less interesting. Stories of people and specific businesses were illustrative. The sections on hiring friends, hiring huggers, and robots were also interesting and surprising. I overall liked the book but I think the subject could have been better addressed by healthcare professional or psychologist.… (meer)

La soledad se ha convertido en la condición definitoria del siglo XXI. Daña nuestra salud, nuestra riqueza y nuestra felicidad e incluso amenaza nuestra democracia. Nunca hasta ahora ha sido tan omnipresente o generalizada, pero tampoco nunca hasta ahora hemos tenido tanto a nuestro alcance para poder hacer algo al respecto.

Antes incluso de que la pandemia mundial introdujera el concepto de «distanciamiento social», el tejido de la comunidad se estaba desmoronando y nuestras relaciones personales estaban amenazadas. Y la tecnología no era la única culpable. Igual de culpables son el desmantelamiento de las instituciones cívicas, la reorganización radical del lugar de trabajo, la migración masiva a las ciudades y décadas de políticas neoliberales que han colocado el interés propio por encima del bien colectivo.

No se trata tan solo de una crisis de bienestar mental. La soledad aumenta nuestro riesgo de enfermedades cardíacas, de padecer un cáncer o demencia. Estadísticamente, es tan malo para nuestra salud como fumar quince cigarrillos al día. También representa una crisis económica que nos cuesta miles de millones al año. Y una crisis política, ya que los sentimientos de marginación alimentan la división y el extremismo en todo el mundo. Pero también es, además, una crisis que tenemos el poder de resolver.

Combinando una década de investigación con informes de primera mano, Noreena Hertz nos lleva desde una clase de «cómo leer una cara» en una universidad de la Ivy League hasta trabajadores remotos aislados en Londres durante el cierre; desde «alquilar a un amigo» en Manhattan hasta residentes de un asilo de ancianos tejiendo gorros para sus cuidadores robot en Japón.

Ofreciendo soluciones audaces que van desde una inteligencia artificial compasiva hasta modelos innovadores para la vida urbana y nuevas formas de revitalizar nuestros vecindarios y reconciliar nuestras diferencias, El siglo de la soledad ofrece una visión esperanzadora y empoderante sobre cómo sanar nuestras comunidades fracturadas y restaurar la conexión en nuestras vidas.… (meer)

En bok for alle og særlig for beslutningstakere som ledere og politikere, men også for behandlere. Den handler om oss og verden, om velvære, om savn og nødvendige behov. Ikke minst har den med vår innside - både hjerne og kropp. Med forskningsbelegg fra alle mulige felt vedr. både påstander, hypoteser og forslag. Hun drar oss igjennom den nære historie, men også med henvisninger til bl a antikken. Hun utvider ensomhetsbegrepet til å dekke vår plass i hele verden, at vi blir sett, hørt, tatt på alvor. Korona, digitalisering, dele-økonomien, markedsliberalismen, populismen, narsissismen - alle får plass. Hun foreslår robotskatt og skatt på tomme forretningslokaler, skattelette for virksomheter med klare sosiale ambisjoner og effekter osv. Et eksempel på en tverrfaglig økonom som skjønner mennesker og som bruker statistikk og tall koblet til livene våre.… (meer)