What if we were allowed to strive for "enough"
For background, I'm a shop owner. I own a small brick and mortar (ok, plywood and LVL and weird fake brick, but whatever) yarn store in a suburban town.
I keep getting emails from review sites, my point of sale system, random cold calls: "increase your sales!" "advertise in more markets!" "unchecked growth!" "people always need more!"
Okay, those last two were paraphrases, but the first two aren't.
And like. We're a small shop. I have a relatively large staff and it's still under ten people. Only two or three of us can actually get a package in the mail. Mostly we have to have a whole conversation with a customer who comes in. I don't want unchecked growth, I don't even want a ton of checked growth. I want steady sales with a stable number of regular customers who buy yarn when they have a new project, and a medium number (maybe 25%?) of new customers who are themselves a mix of people who will become regulars and one-off tourists who will think of us fondly when they go back home. I want a medium number of online sales, again a mix of regulars who know and like us (maybe some of those tourists!) and people who are frantically looking for one last skein to finish a project.
Unchecked growth is BAD. It's unsustainable for us, the humans who actually package and sell the yarn, and it's unsustainable for the customers, who will soon be drowning in yarn that they don't have time to work with because they're too busy buying yarn, and it's unsustainable for the YARN MARKET since there are people who have a finite number of people hours each. Slow, small, steady growth that doesn't balloon out and create a problem for us later is my ideal.
I do understand that the many many MANY people who are trying to sell me advertising don't really care about this, they have been told that their job needs unchecked growth and that they need to keep making their sales numbers increase, despite the fact that that's wildly unsustainable for them, but.
What if there was enough. Not too much, not too little, but enough. What would the world look like if we strove for "enough" rather than "more all the time"? Wouldn't that be nice?
I know that Tumblr doesn't think this is weird and radical, but maybe MAYBE one of the people who's got a horrible sales job at an unnamed review site will happen across this post and think "hmm, maybe it's not me, maybe she just really doesn't want any advertising."
I live in hope, I guess. Hope and a constant state of "no thank you we've got plenty."
This post brought to you by my point of sale system trying to get me to advertise in more markets.
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