There’s a video doing the rounds right now with lots of people sharing it with cute heart emojis or a “this got me crying”... basically a dad telling a bedtime story about the pre and post corona worlds.
Is it me or has he got it all wrong?
In the video he talks about how corporations swelled and got too big, and how life needed to take a pause - we had to get sick to get better.
I get the general sentiment and agree to an extent. But the implication is that the post corona world is going to be some sort of big friendly hippy market with people whittling products from twigs in their garden and bartering with their neighbours for batches of home grown carrots, while the evil greedy big corps come crashing down.
This is simply not the case.
The only businesses thriving right now ARE the big corps.
Amazon, eBay, the supermarkets, the pharmas, the Chinese quick manufacturers of PPE etc, Facebook, Instagram and other social media, Google. These are the businesses that everyone is turning to.
We can pretend we are supporting our local businesses all we like by buying the odd takeaway from a local restaurant but the truth this the scale of that kind of trading is not going to keep these places going.
What will happen post corona is that all the tiny businesses people spent decades of their lives carefully building, the ones that often depend on the talents of one or two people, the ones that consume the owner’s life 24/7, most of these will go to the wall.
But the big evil greedy ones will survive and get stronger and we will have no choice but to depend on them even more.
It annoys me people sharing this video as if this whole “pause” is the best thing that ever happened to the world. It’s not. Yes we could all do with stepping off the carousel and taking stock of things and that is a beneficial thing to do, but we didn’t have to do it all at once.