Harsh business truth.
Your business makes more money than it spends. Or, your business is a sinner in the hands of angry creditors. For as long as it survives. Which is unlikely to be for long.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba reads that one-quarter of all businesses fold within a year of startup. Half of all businesses fold within five years. In the Untied States of America, in the common era year 2023, between 4,000 and 8,000 businesses a day closed their doors. Because they committed the sin of not having enough customers to ensure that the business made more money than it spent. Crede expertum; YFNA has first-hand experience of how quickly a business can fall over if it loses its customers.
You wish to get rid of a bad business? Simple. You refuse to be a customer. You refuse to let others be customers. Friends don’t let friends perpetrate holocausts.
Advertising exists to prevent this ‘denial of custom’ from happening. Advertising finds the customer and binds dem to the brand. It’s a lot cheaper to push the product than to fix it so it properly benefits society. Who doesn’t want their sheets whiter than white? And who cares if there aren’t any fish in the lake any more? Who doesn’t want their car’s gasoline engine to run smoothly? And who cares that the fruit on the trees and bushes by the side of the road isn’t safe to eat? Who doesn’t want their computer to be half as heavy and with three times the battery life? And who cares if the cobalt for the battery comes from slave labor in the Congo?
Who doesn’t want to feel that their personal boogeybuggers are getting theirs, just by going to a rally, thrusting arms in the air, and shouting Fight! Fight! Fight!
Or Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
“In the name of the German People”: the header of the document sentencing the leaders of the White Rose resistance movement to death, February 1943.
Earlier this year (2024), British academic Ellen Pilsworth published an article about how Germans under Adolf Hitler became a ‘bystander society’ – one that progressively, and tamely, accepted the atrocities prosecuted in their names by their government. She quotes from the autobiographical report by German journalist Sebastian Haffner, on the day in 1933 when brown-shirted storm troopers forced Jews out of the law office in which he was working:
What should I do? Just ignore them, do not let them disturb me. … a brown shirt approached me and took up position in front of my work table. ‘Are you Aryan?’ Before I had a chance to think, I said, ‘Yes.’ A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat. I had failed my first test.
Haffner had become a customer.
Later, Haffner is at an indoctrination camp for law students. He is to perform the Nazi salute and sing pro-Nazi songs. Or else …
For the first time I had the feeling, so strong it left a taste in my mouth: ‘This doesn’t count. This isn’t me. It doesn’t count.’ And with this feeling I too raised my arm and held it stretched out ahead of me for about three minutes.
In 1938, with his officially-Jewish girlfriend in deadly peril, Haffner finally removed his custom by leaving Germany. Most of his compatriots did not.
They remained customers.
When it is possible to close a business by defying its advertising, by decrying its falsehoods, by denying it the customers it needs to exist, it’s too hard. Who doesn’t want to feel that their personal boogeybuggers are getting theirs …?
Afterwards?
It’s too late.
