4 ms·
In my opinion, if you have a business running consistently without any slack, you don't have a real business, it's a zombie business. It's a risky gamble on whe
by superchroma 4y ago
In my opinion, if you have a business running consistently without any slack, you don't have a real business, it's a zombie business. It's a risky gamble on whether things may improve. Sure, you're paying the bills, today, but when something happens you're toast, and unfortunately, things do tend to happen. I'm not sure it's possible to gesture to many times in history where there wasn't changes occurring, and that's not even factoring in people's personal turmoils either.
And I do think governments have a direct role they can play here, but, maybe also, something that they don't do much of is messaging. I wonder if there's a place to reach out to people running businesses like these and provide some sort of free business counselling, advice or guidance. Maybe some of these business owners would benefit from being reminded about their situations. Many won't, as they have emotional investments in their businesses and probably won't want to hear bad news, but maybe some can be helped? My impression of Americans is that many of them truly believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires and also believe that rewards and stability come through the liberal application of enough hard work and years of unrewarded effort. Sometimes that is true, but there are scores who don't achieve what they're after with these methods, particularly because failure is basically invisible (!). Generally I think that it may be time to look at retiring these memes.
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoHow do you define "slack?"
- superchroma 4y agoThe obvious one is a financial buffer, as you can pave over many issues with money, but there are other factors like having some free personal time, friends to be able to reach out to, etc, that are equivalently valuable in a pinch.
- physicsguy 4y agoWith super low interest rates for a long time and government financial support during COVID, the number of zombie businesses surviving longer than they probably should has been enormous. But with that said, it’s not something to celebrate, people’s lives are hugely affected when they lose employment.
- superchroma 4y agoAbsolutely, I am hugely sympathetic because a lot of people who invested everything they have and got emotionally invested are going to lose their shirts if things get worse.
- imtringued 4y agoZombie companies die the moment they have to compete over employees.
- rezbull 4y agoYou would be surprised to learn that majority of small businesses that you buy from on a daily basis operate on razor thin margins.
- superchroma 4y agoI'm not, and it's not ok they do, either. I'm not condemning the way they run, I'm sad we as a society cut everything so close to the bone that this became normal.
- imtringued 4y agoA zombie company is an undead company meaning it is no longer vulnerable to small cuts and bruises and is effectively immortal to anything that doesn't decisively crush the head or cuts off entire limbs.and even then if it only loses an arm it will keep going for some time. By this definition a small company on the edge of solvency wouldn't be a zombie because it isn't even dead yet and it's glass like fragility is unlike that of a zombie. A zombie company is either a declining company that is so large it abuses its monopoly position or other advantages to outlive all the fragile glass companies (think intel killing transmeta) or it is a company that has superior access to investors and external funding and manages to revive over and over again. Unfortunately that isn't what zombie company means in colloquial language, in colloquial language it just means "I don't like this company, I will pretend to know something about it that I don't, shut it down" and generally this is used to not shut down hard to kill companies but small businesses that aren't abusing their customers and don't want to completely dominate the economy but rather just want to earn a little bit more than employees do.