What if businesspeople started saying no to the
prevailing corporate ethic that your business must always be getting bigger
to be a “winner”? Well, it’s happening. It gets little coverage
by a media constantly fawning over the barons who run the slam-bam
expansionist operations such as Amazon and Starbucks, but a quiet rebellion
is spreading among entrepreneurs who are choosing a heretical business
path. These are folks who want to make a profit — but not a killing.
They don’t want to run over their competitor or become a far-flung
chain. They want more control over their own lives, and they want their
businesses to be based on genuinely satisfying customers and treating
workers as valued partners. One of these community-based entrepreneurs says that
he rejected the chance to buy out a competitor: “I’d rather
pack my kids’ lunch and walk them to school.” Another, who runs
a tea shop, is dreaming not of 10,000 stores but of making customers feel
truly welcome: “You need to become part of the community and give
people an alternative to the big chains.” Likewise, the owner of a
natural-foods store that successfully goes head to head with the Whole
Foods supermarket chain says, “We live in an isolated and lonely
culture. People stop in our store for the social interaction, as well as
the products. We’re an oasis.”
These community-based entrepreneurs are creating an
economic model that contributes much more to our society’s pursuit of
happiness than the suck-’em-dry Wal-Mart model so beloved by the
corporate establishment. You can vote with your dollars: Either choose
Wal-Mart, where they have to hire a greeter to give you a hokey hello . . .
or choose some real place where they actually know your name.
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2005.
