By R.C. Seely
BETWEEN THE NEGATIVE coverage in the media and the comments by the president, internet giant Amazon is getting beaten up in the public eye. And it’s all because of a lie perpetrated by their rivals. Many companies didn’t plan for the internet when it was new and over built on outlet stores. That’s why they have been losing money and had to contract.
You talk to the emerging online giants, they see brick-and-mortar stores as still a viable option, they weren’t properly utilized is all.
Take specialty glasses and sunglasses online retailer Warby Parker, it launched in 2010, and is expecting major growth. “By the end of 2016, it had 36 stores… Today, it has a total of 63 locations across the US and Canada, with plans to hit 90 by 2019,” reported Entrepreneur magazine, in its March issue.
How is this possible? You may ask. Retail stores are dying off so fast they may need to be placed on the endangered species list. Real estate firm Crushman Wakefield tallies the numbered of closed stores in 2017 at 9,000 and an additional 12,000, or more, by the end of 2018.
And Warby Parker isn’t alone in thinking store expansion is a sound idea. The Canadian company, Tease-Tea, plans on opening doors in New York. British based athletic brand Gymshot is considering opening stores in Los Angeles.
What do these companies know that the larger retailers don’t? Nothing really, they simply have proven better with the knowledge. It’s a system referred to as Deep Data, a set of algorithms based on the previous buying habits of past customers. Mostly it’s a s common sense sociological analysis–monitoring where they have the most sales when they were online only and only building there. Sounds like a practical model to me and like a winning strategy too.
E-commerce companies Birchbot, Everlane, Bonobos are talking about taking about going brick-and-mortar as well. Even though there’s a certain amount of risk to this strategy, Warby Parker maintains it worth it and appears they are not the only one.
In the Entrepreneur interview they also argue there are lessons to be learned:
“The physical store also creates data that no online store ever could. For example, Warby Parker recently tested a kiosk-style pop-up in … a mall in lower Manhattan… The company learned something unexpected: Customers don’t like trying on prescription glasses in a public setting: it’s too intimate… But sunglasses sold well.”
Deep Data science is comparably new, but it already appears to be an effective tool to avoid overbuilding and while some retail insiders say be cautious, ignoring Deep Data might be a missed opportunity. Used efficiently Deep Data may lessen the gamble.
R.C. Seely is the founder of americanuslibertae.com and ALTV. He has written books on pop culture and has an upcoming new release–Confused Yet?: Understanding the Utterly Incomprehensible.
On Intelligent Disobedience
Posted: June 13, 2018 in Social CommentaryBy R.C. Seely
IS OBEDIENCE TO a bad law moral? Or what about defience to a leader asking you to do an immoral command? We all know that issues of moralty can be difficult, as they should be, but are indoctrinating conformity when that’s the more harmful decision? I think the answer is a clear yes and always have felt that way. And I’m not alone in this. Ira Challeff the founder of the International Leadership Association’s Followership Learning Community and has studied the topic giving his take in his book Intelligent Disobedience. In the text he gave multiple examples of times when the inclination to obey has wrong and fatal, and other times when disobedience saved lives.
We know that many of the worst atrocities have been justified because the perpetrators were simply “doing their jobs” but what of those who didn’t obey because it wasn’t the right course of action.
Challeff talks about a young nurse who attended one of his lectures of her experience with Intelligence Disobedience. It was shortly after getting out of nursing school and she was assisting a cardiac patient in the ER. She was ordered by the emergency room physician to administer a medication that was questionable. After she objected, she was given the typical response from an authority figure to “just do it.” Her final response was:
Should the nurse have done what she were told, simply because her superior told her to? In this case it might have killed patient and her actions got the doctor to reconsider the treatment and the patient lived. If things had ended differently, there would have been a review and she would have to defend that act of insubordination. That is an admitted heavy weight which needs to be countered against your confidence in what your doing is right.
Challeff offers this as the simplest test of whether disobedience is valid: “Based on the information we have and the context in which the order is given, if obeying is likely to produce more harm than good, disobeying is the right move, at least until we have further clarified the situation and the order.”
We shouldn’t disobey because of power struggles. Challeff has his own experience with that in the dentist chair when a defient nurse kept second guessing him in front of Challeff and kept drilling the tooth getting a cavity taken care of. The end result was the tooth was damaged from the treatment and required more repair. Disobedience because ego satisify this definition.
Another example was the children who were told not “to leave the room for any reason” while their working mother had to give a speech at a work conference. The building caught fire and if the children had obeyed the would have perished. Or the commercial flight that wouldn’t have crashed if the co-pilot had been more insistent in his concerns. The investigation’s assessment even found his disobedience would have been the right choice.
Law enforcement and military are not immune to these issues either. Because of the power and extended legislative immunity they hold, it makes it even more important. The pressure to stay compliant is even more rigorous than for civilians but lives are on the line. It’s important to remember that as a police officer or soldier you face a tribunal for wrong doing. Military is extremely efficient at accountability too, law enforcement needs work.
Most occupations have watchdog groups keeping an eye out for misconduct. It makes society safer for the most part, but even they are not infallible. They are created and filled with flawed humans acting as our advocates, and occasionally they fall short. Maybe someone will come up with a perfect system but I doubt it. In the mean time we will have to settle for what we have and at times practice the Intelligent Disobedience to expose the flaws in that system.
R.C. Seely is the founder of americanuslibertae.com and ALTV. He has also written books on pop culture and has new book–Confused Yet?: Understanding the Utterly Incomprehensible soon to be released.