Good Business Tactics?

Hope everyone enjoyed the 4th of July holiday.  We spent the day with neighbors and our friend from Pennsylvania who is in town for the week. 

Over this past weekend my laptop crasheed.  Well, I'm not so sure it actually crashed but when I turned it on the monitor stayed black with a very faint indication of the screen that was supposed to be showing.  I hit the Fn and F8 to brighten the screen to no avail.  Truthfully, I had noticed over the past week or so that the screen was getting dim and I would have to brighten it more and more frequently.  I think I could probably replace a fuse or something, but I'm much too busy to mess with it.  So, I bought a new one.  I really didn't expect the new one to arrive for a week or two but lo and behold, I got a message today that it's on the UPS truck to be delivered today. 

In the meantime, I've been using my old tower computer.  It's funny how we denote computers as old.  The laptop was 5 or 6 years old and my tower is about 7 or 8 years old.  Even for a dog or cat, that's young.  Not so for a computer.  It reminds me of the story of the Singer sewing machine.  The first sewing machine that Singer put on the market was the old treadle machine.  Those machines were so well built that they simple never died.  Mother would pass them onto daughter.  The Singer Company, so the story goes, realized that they could sell lots more sewing machines if they weren't built so well.  They began to, intentionally, build sewing machines that did not last a lifetime.  I still have my grandmother's Singer treadle machine and it still works.

George gets tickled because I call it the dumbing of America.  Just think about it.  If you have a business, you want people to purchase more and more of what you are selling.  If the general population can make what you are selling, then your profits go down.  What if you encouraged the people not to make the item but rather to purchase it from you?  Why would they do that?  One reason is because it is one less thing that they have to do in their daily lives.  One less thing they have to know.  And, if you don't know how to make the item, then you cannot teach your children.  Eventually, if you want the item, the only way to get it is to buy it.  If the item doesn't last long, you have to buy it over and over and over again.  And, if the item or service happens to be an essential item or service, then you are guaranteed business.  All you have to mess with at that point are competitors.  To make it even better, you could gather your competitors into an organization and come up with a reason that the government should pass laws requiring people to purchase your product, or, limiting who can sell your product or service.  That, dear readers, is good business.

Enough of that.  The computer has not stopped me from embroidering and this week we've embroidered more napkins and more market baskets.  The pictures will come later.

C'est tout, mes amis