July 22, 1998

May I help you, sir?

This is addressed only to readers under 30, for reasons that will be obvious to readers over 50. These are business ideas I pass on free of charge for those sufficiently energetic and dedicated to try them out. Open up a gasoline station. Feature hard working young people in snappy uniforms who descend upon every car, greet the customer by name with a cheerful smile, fill the tank, check oil and fluids, put air in the tires as needed. If the car needs routine service or repairs, do them right there at your station, at a fair price.

Start a new shoe store. Furnish it with low stools, where the helpful salesperson sits comfortably as he removes the customer's shoe, measures his foot with a special device, and finds him just the right size and right style shoe.

Open up a pharmacy, where customer and pharmacist can get to know each other. The customer can get to know and trust you, the pharmacist. You take a personal interest in each customer's health, and warn that customer early on if you spot clashes in his medicines. Set up one phone company, one electric company, one gas company, one water service company, one TV cable company. As the only ones in the community providing those services, you could operate efficiently as the natural monopolies each of those services actually are. In return for your guaranteed profits, you would be very closely regulated by public utility commissions, and provide good services to your customers at fair prices. Customers would grow to trust you to do what's best for them. Customers would cease to be slammed, misled, lied to, or harassed by competitive telemarketers interrupting each nightly meal. Customers would be happy to know they didn't have to continually pursue the will of the wisp of the lowest price, since that's what they would get. You would not be selling your service to one customer for a low price to be competitive, and his next door neighbor at a higher price because he was naive or wasn't paying attention. Your phone company would be able to provide peripheral services as part of the low basic rate, including directory assistance and equipment repair.

Using the Pacifica Tribune as your example of how it can be done, find a community without a good local weekly newspaper. Work hard, dedicate your life to the community, hire ambitious young people and train them to be good reporters and editors. As they move on to the large dailies, hire others to take their place. Become the voice of your town. It's probably obvious to older readers that what I've described is only a small part of what we've lost in the last fifty years in this country. Lookalike shopping centers, franchises instead of individuality, depersonalized non-services have taken over, proliferating like exotic weeds. Gresham's law, which states that bad money drives out good, has become the law of business competition. Bad service has driven out good. We all lose. The result is too-tight shoes you selected without help, pumping your own gas, arguing with telemarketers nightly, and suffering the consequences of drug interactions.

Paul Azevedo likes E-mail, tape recorders and computers, but he misses helpful service stations, pharmacists who can argue local politics, and comfortable shoes.