Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017772
Wisdom
Economic Forces
A microcosm of the forces reshaping the modern economy ... better to work for a hedge fund than a local hardware store!
Peter Burgess
At the end of November, on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, Chelsea Convenience Hardware will close for good: “Inside, tools and supplies are piled to the ceiling, and when you enter, the owner, Naum Feygin, an immigrant from Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, looks up to ask you what you need. The ‘convenience’ in the store’s name is no misnomer, for the place is extraordinarily efficient. It is cheaper and faster than ordering from Amazon and offers expert advice that reduces the risk of buying the wrong thing. It is all too easy on Amazon, for example, to buy halogen bulbs that don’t fit your lamp base; Mr. Feygin has spared me many such headaches. And the store’s small size is a virtue: Unlike at Home Depot, you can be in and out in 10 minutes.
“Nonetheless, Chelsea Convenience is set to close at the end of November, another casualty of rising commercial rents and competition from e-commerce. The closing is of no great economic significance, other than to Mr. Feygin. But it is a microcosm of the forces reshaping the United States economy, often paradoxically and for the worse. Why is a less efficient, less personalized and more wasteful way of buying screws and plungers—ordering online—displacing the local hardware store? ... The fate of Chelsea Convenience shows, in its small way, that business and capitalism can be at odds—that the drive for immense capital gains can drain the life out of human-scale business. For entrepreneurs, the American economy, with its extreme centralization, is becoming more like the Soviet economy Mr. Feygim left behind.
“As for Mr. Feygin himself, he isn’t sure what he will do next. ‘It is hard,’ he says, ‘very hard.’ He had hoped that his son, Willem, would want to take over the store. But Willem is ‘not so stupid,’ Mr. Feygin says. ‘He works for a hedge fund.’”
And that's what's ahead.