It’s a shame we weren’t around when dinosaurs became extinct. Then again, maybe we are.
News Limited business commentator Terry McCrann writes about the “Bleakest of views from the shopfronts” in his Sunday column describing the problems of retail.
All of the problems Terry cited are from big retailers – Woolworths, Dick Smith, Harvey Norman and JB HiFi. To make it clear he was talking about corporate issues there’s even a reference to General Motors.
Nowhere does Terry talk about smaller businesses or those challenging the big guys, folk like Ruslan Kogan or the Catch of the Day team. It’s all about the big end of town.
Terry’s article illustrates the problem of relying on incumbent mainstream media commentary; that it is Big Media talking about Big Business and Big Government.
“Small”, “ordinary” or “average” has no place in their conversation, if you can call the pronouncement of mainstream media commentators a conversation at all.
We can understand this – for a journalist, it’s good for the ego and career to look like a “heavy hitter” in big business. For the politician, small business and community groups can’t pay the speaking and consulting fees paid by corporations to supplement their meagre retirement benefits.
Increasingly what happens in the corporate board rooms or the once smoke filled rooms of political caucuses is out of touch with the real world.
This has become particularly acute since the responses to the 2008 crash proved to the management classes that their bonuses and perks will be protected by government bailouts regardless of how many billions of shareholder wealth they manage to destroy.
In the United States we see this in political controversies being focused on contraception – an issue settled forty years ago – while the country faces fundamental challenges to its economic base and the basic welfare of its citizens and industries.
While in Australia the media ‘insiders’ rabbit on about pointless internal party politics and soothing articles on how everything else is fine, we just need to be more optimistic. Yet the real questions about how we take advantage of the country’s greatest export boom, position the economy for the next 50 years and the nation’s dependence on the Chinese economy are being ignored.
Terry McCrann’s story is emblematic of just how out of touch Big Media, and their friends in Big Business and Big Government, are with the real world.
All we can do is let them get on with it and not take them too seriously.
Right on Mr Brashes!!
I think you are on target Paul.
Couldn’t agree with you more.
The other example, for me, of politics and media becoming obsolete and irrelevant was the whole Prime Minister leadership challenge the other week.
That whole week I was in a course and only by glancing at newspaper headlines did I realise that anything was going on. I’m sure if I had been a large consumer of mainstream media that I could have been caught up in the hype about it all – but I wasn’t.
At the end of the week, nothing had changed so I really didn’t miss anything. Had there been a change of leadership, it wouldn’t have made any difference to my daily life either. Politics is about corporate lobbying and back room deals that seem so far removed from daily life that the rest of just get on with making a living.
Hi Paul
I agree with much of what you said, but what’s more is that not all of the big retailers are struggling in the way that Terry McCrann makes us out to believe.
The part of your blog I particularly like is the focus on the innovation of the new players. I’m not particularly a fan of Kogan, but it is the need to increase productivity through innovation that matters.
I’ve said more about it in my blog here
http://sociallibecorat.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/terry-mccrann-retail-is-changing-its.html
Cheers
Mark S