Star Trek Futures

So, how does a quantum retailer approach the issue of lockdown?

This is in many ways a typical quantum retail problem – the interplay between two competing forces, in this case the needs of the individual versus the needs of society.

It’s Kirk and Spock at the end of Wrath of Khan. Or Beyond Darkness if you prefer, which for many reasons I don’t.

The world of Trek has done away with money. The world of Vulcan has done away with emotion. This should be easy. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

Or was that the needs of the money?

My business – many businesses in fact – need money. People need it, because we don’t live in Star Trek world. And we have rent to pay and debt to service and utilities and suppliers and staff. We could not be where we are today without all those people, and thus our debt is not just financial. It’s emotional. We aren’t vulcans.

If we prosper at the expense of others, is it truly prosperity? Retail is an accord, between customer and store, that the store will do the heavy lifting of obtaining goods and services that the customer needs, in return for a percentage of the worth of said item.

A margin.

Some people like the scales tipped. Deep discounting erodes that bond, not because it exists, but because it lies. It says ‘you can have all this for less, this person? They are ripping you off – making money off you. Only I am your friend’. Imagine it if you would in a Smeagol voice. I do. That was the cries of the Magic-mongers outside every GP, hawking their wares from car boots without any passing taxman seeing a portion of their margin, and this migrated online in the early days of the internet.

“Nobody will ever love you like discount-Smeagol loves you, my precious!”

Piling it high and selling it cheap has always been a tactic, ever since ‘King’ Kroger invented the supermarket, horrifying countless generations of merchants stretching back to the markets of Uruk. I mean, logic – vulcan logic – dictates that things have a cost, and delivering and providing goods and services has a cost. You might even feel differently about that cost if you saw the owner begging for change outside the metro station to afford the fare home, or sliding into the seat of a sports car.

Because we can estimate the value goods, but we also estimate the value of humans. But we do it inversely.

Who do we value right now? The billionaires asking us to return to work to buoy up the stock market, or the nurses and care workers at the front line, and the checkout staff at the supermarket risking their lives so we can eat? Wealth is not a signifier of the value of a human.

It’s what they do for you that counts.

Now, I’ve talked about the interplay between the transactional and the emotional before. How game stores sell happiness. But we currently do not live in that world. In a climate of fear, happiness is hard to comeby.

American deaths from COVID-19 have eclipsed all the deaths of US troops in Vietnam. As I write this, the virus did that in six weeks. In the UK we have our own disgracefully grim total – the second highest in the world. 75 years ago last week, the Nazis finally surrendered after six years of war with Britain. And we have already lost half as many people to COVID-19 as civilians who perished in night after night of constant blitz that burned our cities to the ground and turned them into rubble.

Half that total dead, from a virus.

Needs of the many. Needs of the one.

Every part of the economy needs revenue in order to survive. I’d love to live in the world of Star Trek, but what would I actually do? What would people do? Not everyone gets to be a starship captain – some of us are just fuck ups. And we’re stuck here in virus world.

As an individual I need to generate money to pay my suppliers, my landlord, my staff. Those are the many and I am the one.

As an individual I need to generate money to feed my family. They are the many and I am the one.

As an individual I need to provide a place of support and a service to my customers. Again, the many.

And lastly, I live in a society. AND MY SOCIETY NEEDS ME TO NOT DO THOSE THINGS. Or people might die. Many people.

From space, each many is an individual. One planet versus many planets. One species versus many species. One country versus many countries.

The belief that one country is inherently superior to another has many names. We might be kind and refer to it as exceptionalism – like the America of the 1950’s, or Victorian Britain. A country defined by its achievements. “So, what did your country do recently? We invented industry” said nineteenth century Britain.

But exceptionalism was built on unfettered access to resources, the labour of the many and ultimately it did so for the benefit of the few. One country – one business – leaps ahead while everyone else gets to play catch up.

Exceptionalism without being exceptional is Nationalism. That your country is just somehow better, despite all evidence to the contrary. Even now our politicians are spinning our tragically high COVID-19 death rate as a triumph, because we are accurately reporting more deaths than other countries. “See that country over there, busy re-opening its stores and restaurants? They just weren’t as accurate in their reporting as us?”

Is there a Star Trek race of arrogant wankers?

PLEASE DON’T SAY THE VULCANS! We’re so not the vulcans. Vulcans would have aced this with science in fifteen minutes. We did the exact opposite of that.

Logic.

Vulcans trade in logic. Ferengi trade in latinum. Kirk trades in his ability to teach alien women the meaning of love and Bones McCoy trades in “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor not a miracle worker!”

Money itself of course is a logical solution to a real world problem, of how to accurately measure worth for trade. Logic dictates that the more you have the more resources you can buy. Little wonder the Ferengi crave it.

My store remains closed. Shuttered. Empty. My ability to generate revenue has dried to a trickle from a flow.

Somewhere along the timeline we reach a tipping point, where we trade human life for latinum. We make the logical call that the needs of the many is the needs of the economy, and the needs of the few are the dead.

That sucks if you are one of the few.

Many stores went into this crisis responsibly. They enacted rapid social distancing, curbside delivery, froze organised play space. But this solution is a temporary one, like lockdown.

Logic dictates that a restaurant which can only serve half the covers it used to can no longer charge what it used to. Costs didn’t go down. Ingredients, staff, rent, utilities. Few restaurants could handle a sixty percent drop in trade and not go to the wall. Margins were already tight.

The online Gollums didn’t have a pause. Self-exempted from lockdown. Essential. Trading as usual, only better. Anyone who could be exempt from lockdown seized upon it and tried their best to make lemonade.

As far as I know nobody is tracking sales assistant deaths from COVID-19. I took my friend ages to be recognised as a keyworker for her work delivering parcels for Hermes 24/7. To many people our work, what we do as retailers is ephemeral. “Sorry you lost everything, but I still got my games so it’s all good” says society.

That’s just more pressure on stores to reopen. To re-open quickly and to reopen hard. The needs of the money versus the needs of the few. Your president and our Prime Minister have spoken. “Holiday time is over” they say. “Your economy needs you to run into those little viral bullets, so we don’t have to run into post-viral ballots”.

And we need it too. Eventually. Because we don’t have a function in Star Trek world. And if I don’t get my store re-opened in some capacity, I’ll shortly not have a function in this one.

…and yet?

Our industry is resilient. It weathered the dot-com bust. Weathered the collapse of the comic bubble, the collapse of the d20 bubble, the collapse of the TCG bubble. Weathered the credit crunch. In many ways we are countercyclical. And unlike theatres and cinemas and bars and restaurants, we have stuff to sell. To people. To enjoy at home.

But our USP was our stores. Our physicality. That is currently our weakness. If we can weather this storm, it will be our strength again. You can’t rewire two hundred thousand years of human conditioning in eight weeks. The needs of the many? It’s ultimately to be in a room with the many.

We just have to sit tight and hope for that future right now, and decide how effectively we can operate with minimal risk.

Society needs our stores to survive. Our customers need our stores to survive. Our suppliers, our families, everyone needs our stores to survive. But we need to do it safely.

And logically.

Engage!