When did you last:
- buy a newspaper or book
- use a real camera
- plug in your Garmin and stick it on the windshield
- shop in a mall, or
- use your home phone?
That cellphone you are reading this on? It’s replaced entire industries – landline phones, books, newspapers, white noise machines, handheld recorders, calculators, radios, bank visits, cameras, video cameras, stereos, maps and satellite navigation devices, paper tickets, even desktop computers.
Your Lyft/Uber account? For many, it’s replaced a personal vehicle.
That box on your front step? It’s taken out thousands of local retail establishments and hundreds of malls.
These are just three of the all-but-invisible ways technology has radically changed our world – and your business – over the last decade.
It is well worth stopping to consider this when planning for the future. Here are a few takeaways.
Construction is affected by much lower retail construction coupled with a very recent spike in home ownership. After years when millennials chose to live in small apartments, group homes, or with relatives, it looks like getting your own place is back.
Maybe they can convert malls to apartment complexes?
The net – lower commercial construction will be balanced out by more residential building.
Manufacturing employment is growing much more slowly than manufacturing output, driven by the Administration’s tariffs, the “cellphone effect”, and accelerating use of robotics and sister technologies.
We may have reached peak auto manufacturing, with significant structural implications for the auto industry and its entire supply chain and service infrastructure.
What does this mean for you?
Is your business model prepared for the future?
