The unintended consequences of covid-19 (both good and bad) are really surprising.
So much of what we do is inertial, normalized insanity that bears some introspection.
For example, it's interesting to hear so many people talk about how they miss shopping. I'm the same way, and it made me think ... wait a minute, I've saved more money in the past two months than I have in years, I don't feel like I'm missing any tangible goods ... maybe rampant consumerism is, in aggregate, bad for me?
Same with dining out, which I did with incredible frequency.
All of this makes me think not just about my behavior, but the massive drivers behind making us all want to spend money on things we don't need in the pursuit of manufactured pleasure.
https://twitter.com/nkozyra/status/1263106625335734273
It's a weird statement on where modern startup/retail is.
In other words, my issue isn't with the mechanics of capitalism.
These are customized. I mean, if this were the only company selling facemasks, sure, $15 is a lot. But for somebody who wants to jazz up their facemask, maybe $15 makes sense. I'm not interested in that but maybe somebody is.
If burgers were a thing people could use in a pandemic to reduce transmission and they let affiliates put a design on the bun and upcharge to get a sliver of profit I think this might be a fair analog.
I dunno, I think this is a missed opportunity for some good pr, or at least not look like they're exploiting a crisis even further.
I did see the other day Chipolte is doing their own delivery service now which is awesome. Not sure why more places ditch Grubhub and Doordash and just have their own in house delivery service. It's so much cheaper than outsourcing to companies who've been gouging restaurants and the consumer.
Basically contract delivery services have a premium to begin with, to take the delivery business off your hands. If you have dramatically more orders per day, it can actually make sense to have your own delivery people; especially since your managers have all the time in the world to focus on delivery now that your dine-in is closed or restricted.
I may be the only person in my apartment complex ordering Chipotle for dinner tonight, but there are going to be several others ordering something.
Now, unlikely and difficult don't mean impossible but there's more to it than meets the eye.
Instead, it's a platform that incentivizes affiliates to markup face masks. Like, there's no value add here.
It's interesting to think about what long term effects this will have on shopping, particularly retail stores long term. This was a good piece on it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-coronavirus-bull-market-for-g... This will definitely impact the way people interact/eat in NYC.
Reminds me of something I recently learned about the word ‘apocalypse’ which is the greek word meaning ‘revelation’ (e.g. book of revelation).
A revelation is an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known _and_ which could not have been known apart from the unfolding events.
Ergo, this event is an apocalypse (of sorts :))
I remember talking with some ex-colleague of mine some 3 months ago, just before the pandemic hit us (where I live, that is) - we were talking about how this would impact business, and to my big surprise he was very cool about the situation. I had to remind him that he (working in marketing, living in a tourist city) was only approximately two edges away from the businesses most in danger of getting pummeled by the virus.
But, no, it was only "hysteria". Lo and behold, 6 weeks later he's temporarily laid off, because the businesses he's making ads for are closing down, because they again were supplying stuff to the travel industry, among others.
And we're going to see a lot more of that, in the upcoming months. The reach is wide, and the aftershock is long.
The bigger issue is buried in the middle of the article: we lost out on possible transplants because of lack of COVID-19 tests. There's no upside to that.