The Good New Days

They're putting another Target store in the empty shell that used to be an Orchard Supply Hardware store in the shopping center at the top of our hill. The shopping center has been there since the hill got developed back in the 1950s, but it's changed a lot, and the fate of the empty store has been the subject of much speculation and comment on Nextdoor, the website and app that enables people to post about local news and events and confirm that we are surrounded by some very odd and intolerant people.

When the news came down that Target was coming in, the Nextdoor crowd swiftly moved from posting celebratory notes of the "now I don't have to go to Torrance/San Pedro!" variety to nostalgia. That's expected, since it sometimes seems that the average age of Nextdoor commenters here is in the 80s, and soon enough there were posts remembering when that store was a Vons supermarket, when there was a Buffum's department store there, when there were local restaurants and stores instead of the chains now populating the center. And, predictably, that led to wish lists of what they'd like to see come back. A book store! A record store! A five-and-dime store! A toy store! A local hardware store!

All nice thoughts. All just not gonna happen. It's 2019. Book stores are not a growth industry. You know how people buy music these days (anecdotes about the vinyl comeback notwithstanding). Drug stores are the new five-and-dime. Toys are the domain of, well, Target and Walmart. We actually have a local hardware store at the bottom of the hill, but competing with Home Depot and Lowe's a few miles away is a tough haul.

Which is to say, wishing things were the way they were back in the day is understandable and, in its own way, entertaining, but it's also futile. And sometimes the new ways are better than the old. For all the faults of the big box stores, they also provide convenience, better prices, an overall better shopping experience, and jobs. And some things are easier, cheaper, and better bought online. Again, it's 2019. We don't ride our horses to Sam Drucker's General Store, either. (Note: People around here DO ride horses and there IS a little General Store, but that's more a novelty for the folks who can afford the equestrian hobby. That would not include me.)

I don't mean to denigrate nostalgia. Far from it; I engage in that all the time. But if it gets in the way of adapting to the new realities, it can paralyze an industry.

You know what I'm talking about.

Radio in general and talk radio in particular are still in the process of changing. We don't really know what the outcome will be. We don't have monetization nailed down, not by a long shot. Measurement's still debatable. We're still asking the same questions over and over: Are downloads the right metric? How will we get demographic information? Is there a place for live broadcasts? Is that place radio or streaming audio or Twitch/YouTube/something else? What's the right length for a podcast? How do you get people to find your podcast/stream/show? Are the big companies going to dominate the new medium and push out the little folks? Where's this going, and are we gonna have jobs?

I don't know all the answers. (I have my educated guesses.) But it's like every other business. People don't buy newspapers anymore, so newspapers have had to figure out how to evolve to the online model and get people to pay for their product. Music went from vinyl to tape to CD to downloads to streaming. TV has a similar evolutionary path. We get our prescriptions, mostly, from chains instead of the apothecary in the village square, and everything else from Amazon, Target, Walmart. We're unlikely to go back, vinyl nostalgia notwithstanding. As bad as private So we have to go forward. Fetishizing the past is amusing as idle chatter on social media, but it's destructive in business. It's nice to remember the local book and toy stores, but they're not coming back. Whether that's good or not isn't relevant. It just is. Prepare to adapt.

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Your talk or morning show should adapt, too. (Okay, that's a horrific segue, but whatever.) Get new stuff to talk about at Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports. It's free. Click here and/or follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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We lost a good man last weekend with the passing of our All Access colleague Jeff Silberman. I've written and did a podcast about Jeff already, but I wanted to remember him here, too, since he always read this column. I half expect him to send me an instant message about it. Miss you already, buddy.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
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