Official Closing Signs Are Up

What a bummer! I've put the signs in the shop window announcing our shop closure and offering 20% off everything. That sucks. But still, I've ordered new business cards and mailing labels today with the new business details on them, and on the signs it doesn't say "Going Out of Business". We're not going out of business. We're going to stop paying rent for something that's turned out to be purely a storage space.

I used to be such a fan of places like Wal-Mart and Hobbycraft until I started my own business. It's the Americanisation of the marketplace. Bigger, faster, cheaper. (Although in our case, we were actually trying to be cheaper than Hobbycraft.) There's a book I read last year for my sociology module at university, The McDonaldization of Society by George Ritzer. Great book. It explains the good things and the bad things that have come out of the fast-food market revolution and how it has extended to other types of business. Image is everything. Hobbycraft, for example, has a market image of smiling pretty mums making handy little projects with their kids. It's a great image, and it's true. Most of us mums don't look like the ones in the commercials, but that's advertising in almost every case.

The problem we faced is the "I want it now" attitude. We can order in virtually every type of craft Hobbycraft can, but we don't have the capital or the space to have it all on demand. Three days from now just isn't good enough, even if we're talking about ordering now for a birthday that isn't until April.

Fortunately, we can fall back on the internet. We're computer savvy, and the hubby is a certified computer geek. This is as opposed to myself. I'm just certifiable.