Big boxes and offshoring

No real fresh thoughts today, so I'll stick with a canned topic. This is, like, a management consultant's version of stand-up. But stale material.

Did you ever think about how Big Boxes and offshoring are two peas in a pod? In the early 90s, WalMart and other Big Boxes really hammered down on trimming fat from retail processes, getting immense economies of scale from technology and supply chain innovations and so on. Main Street was eviscerated, and everybody boohooed and paraded forth nostalgic visions of mom and pops stores which are really just recastings of the romantic myth of the heroic individual vs. the ineluctability of history. John Henry and the steam engine.

Now there's offshoring, where Indian and other firms are doing the same thing to back office processes with bandwidth and eager young would-be office workers over yonder . But there's really no supporting myth for the resistance to outsourcing. There's no romance of the kind and warm CSR or other paper pushing functionary. Just hand-wringing. We're supposed to have jobs, dammit!

Don't get me wrong, it does suck. There are fewer easy ways to have jobs, and fewer pleasant places to shop than there were 20 years ago. But you can buy stuff cheaper, and nobody's really voting with their feet to show that they'll pay more for charm or higher-touch services.

I know, I know, boring. That's what happens when I'm stuck in the office and don't even watch TV.