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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, “The Obsolete Man” is my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone featuring Burgess Meredith, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
Imagine if you will, a world where industry is booming. Store shelves are filled to the brim with exciting products which draw in customers in droves. Books, movies, and music soar in popularity bringing with them new, larger stores with the capacity to bear the demand of enthusiastic shoppers. To some, the growth signals a new revival of business that seems to have no end. To others, the boom signals a changing tide that will crest like a surfer’s wave. To them, the race is on to wax their board, steady their feet, steal their gaze, and prepare for the impending crash.
That’s essentially the world I entered when I started working at the bookstore in the fall of 1994. Christian-focused literature, music, and home videos were in the middle of a massive period of growth. Over the next decade the Christian retail industry would explode in products and popularity. The chain I worked for went from stores around 15,000 square feet to stores around 25,000 square feet. The store I worked at went from 14,000 to over 30,000 square feet.
In addition to the size of the stores growing, so did the number of stores in our chain. We grew from around 10 stores to around 25 stores over the span of a few years. We saw growth all across our industry. Other chains in our industry also saw growth and our annual conferences ballooned in attendance.
When the company started in 1981, it was not just a Christian bookstore. The store also featured office supplies and it was the first discount office supply chain in the Oklahoma City market. Over the next decade, the selection of merchandise grew to include more faith-based books, music, and videos, but also artwork, home decor, and collectible figurines. The store also featured an extensive supply of educational supplies for public, private, and home school educators. The variety of merchandise set us apart in the market and allowed us to serve a wide array of customer needs.
When the dot com bubble arose in the early 2000’s we were slow to adapt. Our website remained an information-only resource until 2006. At that time the company promoted me to oversee a new division that was being created to compete in the e-commerce space. By the time we launched our ecommerce platform in 2008, Amazon was a household name, e-readers were becoming ubiquitous, and iTunes had established itself as the dominant way for obtaining music.
Our industry, which was heavily reliant on books, music, and home video, was hit hard by these changes. Not only were these goods moving to a digital format which consumers could acquire from their computers, Amazon was growing in market share. This meant that even those who wanted a physical copy were more often choosing to order it and have it shipped to their door instead of visiting a physical store like ours.
The boom of the 90’s and early 2000’s was over. Our industry trade show attendance dwindled as stores all across the country closed. The Christian retail industry wasn’t alone. National chains like Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million and others saw significant impact from the crashing tide as well.
A bard named Bob once wrote:
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
This is the sentiment shared in an episode of The Twilight Zone from 1964. No, it’s not “The Obsolete Man” as you might expect, although it could have certainly been titled that. The episode I’m referring to is called, “The Brain Center at Whipple’s.” In Whipple’s, we meet a man who has seen that times are changing. Instead of being swept away by the technological revolution impacting his industry, he chooses to embrace them instead. He purchases and deploys computers to help streamline every aspect of his business. Unfortunately for Mr. Whipple, he fails to see that his own role in the company is also susceptible to needing an upgrade, and he soon finds himself unemployed, replaced by a robot.
Here’s what I learned.
Whether it’s the 1960’s and the employment landscape is trying to understand how the growth and proliferation of computers will impact society, the early 2000’s when the wave of digital commerce took center stage, or today’s arena where AI seems to be impacting more industries and niches everyday, one thing is for certain. Change is inevitable.
When I left the bookstore chain in 2013, the company had weathered the digital transformation storm and had learned how to posture themselves to maintain their footing. Rather than rely on the intellectual property of others supplied to them via record labels and book publishers, they created their own intellectual property in as many areas as possible.
While I was still at the company, our education supplies buying team realized that they had the capacity to create a custom line of classroom storage and decor items. Those lines of products exploded in popularity with our customers and proved the company was capable of not only selling products created and designed by other companies, but that we had the talent to create entirely new products ourselves.
Those new products came with higher profit margins, which gave the company the capital to not only weather the digital storm, but thrive in it. Today the company has grown to 40 locations and is now found in 5 additional states than when I left. Whether it’s apparel, home decor, books, or kids items, you can find products throughout the store that a talented group of product designers working at the corporate office and in partner locations overseas have created from scratch.
As I look at how AI is changing our world, I look at Whipple’s and my old employer as inspiration. For Whipple’s I find it interesting that Rod and those in his world looked at the growing use of computers as something that was going to come in and take over their jobs. This uncertainty caused fear in some and fantasy in others.
I’m not saying that Rod didn’t have a fair amount of both, but his Whipple’s story paints a bleak picture where humans will be replaced at every end of the job line. Airing at the same time as The Twilight Zone was another syfy show called The Jetsons. The Jetsons featured a world where computers and technology enhanced the workplace, made jobs simpler, more efficient, and blended the best of mankind with the best of machines. While we haven’t manifested all the utopian-like benefits of The Jetsons into our modern society, I’d certainly say that its depiction is much more accurate than that of Whipples.
As I look at my former employer, I see a company that seems to be thriving by understanding the full skillset of their employees and having the vision to see how they can leverage that skillset to better serve their customers.
The fact is, AI and robotics are coming. If they haven’t already started to change or disrupt some part of your life, it’s only a matter of time before they do. For me, I’ve discovered ways to use AI to better my skills and provide improved services to my clients. But I’ve barely scratched the surface of how AI can be used in my industry. It’s challenging because AI is changing quickly and what AI once did in a way that was sloppy is quickly becoming quality.
I don’t know where we’ll end up with AI. It’s certainly possible we’ll eventually go full scorched earth like The Terminator. However, what I do know for certain is when times change we can either sit idly by and watch the world pass us by, leaving us scrambling to survive, or we can posture ourselves into a position of learning so that we can ride the impending wave into new areas of success that not only benefit us, but better aid those we set out to serve in the first place.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag coming up in 2 weeks on December 30th! Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.