Saturday, November 16, 2024

Don't wish for a collapse.

I'm seeing this sentiment quite a bit online. I understand the urge, but my experience is that once something collapses it takes a very long time to recover, if ever.

I remember having this discussion with my sportscard wholesaler circa 1990. I mentioned that the industry was so dysfunctional that maybe it needed to hit bottom before it could recover.

"Yeah, me and some of the other wholesalers have been talking about that. Maybe we need it all to collapse so that it can be rebuilt."

So it did collapse, and it's never really recovered fully. It's a full 35 years later and there are occasional surges and it never went away completely, but it's a pale shadow of what it once was.

Over the years I've seen a lot of product lines collapse--I'm watching one right now--and none of them have recovered. A few settled in at a sustainable level, but nowhere near as profitable as they were at their height.

Sure, in the long arc of history, a collapse seem like a blip. But humans don't live in the long arc of history, we live in the short arc of mortality.

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