Post 95 - June 14, 2020

Day 95…

Columbia University is situated more or less about ten blocks to the north of where Michael and I live. The main campus is centered around 116th Street but its tendrils extend in every direction. It forms its own separate neighborhood in the city.

For the most part, when I was in school there, we tended to stay within a pretty tight radius around the center of campus. Columbia College, the undergraduate school, is just one of many that fall under the University’s umbrella. Barack Obama actually graduated from there a year before I did. He transferred in as a junior from Occidental College in California when I was a sophomore. I’m sure I must have passed him on the street at some point, or even been in a class with him, but I didn’t know him.

Columbia University, if you add up all of its’ different schools, has over 32,000 students in any given year. Many of the businesses and services in that central 30 square block area rely on those students to survive.  Those businesses came to be because they provided the students with things that they needed. While there are certainly people unconnected with the school who live up there, a lot of the apartments nearby are typically rented out to students and faculty. These days, the overwhelming majority of those people are not there.

Book Culture is a small independent book seller in New York City with only a few outlets. Earlier in the year, they closed their store on Columbus Avenue just up from the Museum of Natural History, but they kept their two stores up near Columbia open. A few months ago, that was a decision that probably made perfect sense - students always need books whereas normal Upper West Siders only sometimes want them. Now, however, there are far more potential customers near the location that they closed than they are up near Columbia.

This past week, Book Culture re-opened its’ store on Broadway and 114th Street for curbside pick-up. I walked past it yesterday. Somebody was there picking up a book. Will enough people up there do that to keep them going?

One of the reasons so many businesses are going under during this is that they were leveraging expansion against projected earnings. In other words, they were borrowing money to build new stores or ships or planes or whatever. They assumed that the level of income they were getting from the assets they already had would continue or even grow and that would pay for the new stuff. They kept that practice moving forward in an unbroken cycle. Constant expansion and constant debt all relying and betting on constant income. I am sure that none of them really, for a moment, considered that the income would just stop. Completely stop. But then it did.

At its’ peak, Kodak controlled 90% of the US film market and a large share of the international market. They actually developed the first digital camera in 1975 but did not market it for fear of hurting their film business. From that position at the very top of the film market, they did not believe that digital posed any real threat. They were somewhat blinded by their own success and stature. Sony and Canon saw the weakness and charged in to dominate the digital market and, as a result, Kodak went bankrupt. Kodak missed the seemingly obvious and basic idea that people didn’t care about film at all, what they cared about, was pictures.

That was just one business whose misunderstanding of the market doomed them. 

Almost ALL businesses are now facing something similar. I think that, as consumers, while we may still want many of the same things, we may now want a different version of them.

Many of us want to see movies on a big screen. How long is it going to take us, though, for us to be comfortable going back inside a dark crowded movie theatre? I think we are going to want to be shown some new way of experiencing them. Maybe the established theatre chains are doomed, and a new company will start creating open-air theatres that will do just that.

There is a massive wave of marketing heading towards us from just about every company on the planet that is going to try and tell us what we want. They are going to do everything in their power to convince us that the virus is over, or that it was a hoax, and that we can just go back to exactly the way it was before. They want and need us to spend again. The government wants the same thing, so they are leading that charge.

Let’s be clear, though, no matter what the President, the government and these large corporations say, none of them believe that COVID-19 is a hoax. They want US to believe that, but they, themselves, know that not to be true.

If the President actually believed that the virus didn’t exist, why would his campaign require people who are signing up to attend his rally in Tulsa sign something indemnifying them from any sort of blame should anyone who goes contract said virus?

Senator Mitch McConnell has said that corporate liability is a red line for the discussions with the Democrats in terms of the next stimulus bill.  Republicans will NOT back any bill that does not provide liability protection for companies. For a group of people who are claiming this whole thing is a hoax, they seem mighty scared of it themselves.

The cruise ship industry, and I may be biting the hand that feeds me here, is well and truly over-leveraged. The industry as a whole is unimaginably profitable. Rather than banking that earned money, however, they have continued to invest it into more and more, larger and more spectacular ships. Now they have to pay for them. If they are going to get out of the debt hole that they now find themselves in, they need to get people back onto their ships right away to start the money flowing in again.

Michael and I are getting all sorts of cruising offers these days - as many as two or three times a week. For only a couple of hundred bucks, we could go on a cruise and get unlimited booze, shore excursions and even WiFi thrown in for free. The danger of infection is completely glossed over. On the website, we can click on a link to find out what safety measures have been added. With the beautiful and inviting photographs of people enjoying themselves at sea that we are getting in the mail, however, there’s no mention of that. At all.

The people, it seems to me, who are most likely to sign up for these cruises - some of which seem to start as soon as next month - are probably going to be from the states that are most closely aligned with the White House’s “everything is fine” messaging. They are already back to living life as usual. That case rates in most of those places are starting to spike, is being completely ignored. Over the last few days, hospitals in Arizona have started to turn patients away and send them elsewhere because they have already reached capacity. It’s a situation that can only get steadily worse. The thought of all of these people traveling out of Arizona and gathering together with other people from all over the country on a cruise ship is a bit chilling to say the least.

As much as I want to get our show back up and running, this just does not seem to be the time to do that yet. On the other hand, if we wait, say for a vaccine, then the cruise industry may not be able to last.

Until the virus is under some sort of control, they, and many threatened corporations are going to do everything in their power to sell us on the fact that it is safe for us all to get back to business as usual. For our own safety, as this gets going, we need to keep our attention on what they DO and not what they SAY.

When the government and businesses stop worrying about getting sued, that’s when we will finally know that the threat of the virus has passed. Period.

The economy has to start up again. Nobody disputes that. Like the discussions currently happening around the restructuring or eliminating of police departments, HOW the economy gets back up needs to be looked at too.

The recession of 2008 seems to have changed nothing about the way large corporations do business. Twelve years later we are in the same situation only this time it is significantly and exponentially worse.  The White House is pushing to restore everything back exactly the way it was. There is no way that that will happen at this moment in time without incurring a significant amount of suffering and death.

The coronavirus is a real thing. The fact that it has seemingly been controlled in places like NY and New Zealand is meaningless until it has been controlled everywhere. It just takes one infected person arriving from somewhere else to start the whole thing up again. The US government, by actively choosing to ignore the virus, has squandered this time when a national system of testing and tracing could have been put into place.

I am glad to see some of my neighborhood restaurants and bars start to re-open, but all of the people taking their masks off and gathering together are simply going to close them all back down again. Yes, OUR numbers are down, but a few infected people from Arizona or Texas or Florida or wherever show up and sit down at the next table and we are right back to where we were.

Health officials pretty much across the boards, agree on several things. We all need to keep wearing masks. We all need to maintain social distancing whenever we possibly can.

We should be listening to a broad spectrum of health care professionals so that we can figure out what the consensus of their opinions is. From what I can see, it all seems pretty clear. They might disagree about some details, but they are all pretty much in line when it comes to where we are with this virus.

We are going to be sold and sold relentlessly on things by people in the government, and by companies that are desperate. So, turn off the sound and just LOOK. Check out the small print. What are they worried about? What are they trying to protect themselves against?

As I said before, when everyone stops worrying about getting sued, then, and only then, will we finally know that the threat of the virus has truly passed.

Let’s decide what we really want and what we will really be comfortable with.

Take a walk outside and think about it.

Even though I think they may have screwed up and closed the wrong location, I think I am going to head up to Book Culture this afternoon and buy a book.

I am then going to go into the park, with my mask on, sit on a bench away from other people, and read a good story.

It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day.