tl;dr / predicting the predictions for 2022
It’s easy enough to predict the season of predictions. I could’ve predicted that.
Making predictions about the coming year is as natural a human instinct as it is to abandon your car on the highway shoulder of the Mad River Glen parking lot on a powder day, even though it’s clearly high-centered and blocking that Forerunner with Massachusetts plates. You look back at the old, you dream about the new, you set a couple goals, and you ponder some of life’s big questions. Buy or sell? Move or stay? OR or not to OR? Denver or SLC? Rodgers or Garoppolo?
Some meaty ones have already been out for a month … like Galloway, The New Yorker, Forbes, The Economist …Yet as thought provoking and as easy as it may be to slide a few chips onto the table, actually getting those guesses right is hard – and maybe even impossible. What’s wayyy easier is dealing in some broader brushstrokes, thinking more about what conversations in the new year are going to be popular, and a few of the topics that seem natural winners to me include:
1) “Bigger is better” vs. “The rise of the independents”
“Look, I'm a senior now. I'm a single, successful guy. And I've got to be fair to myself” – Brad Hamilton, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”
I know we can all agree it’s been quite a year for the Bigs. They’re opening flagship stores in Boulder. They’re going to space in cowboy hats. They’re announcing growth plans for their growth plans. Everything they’ve touched has gone better than expected in the last couple years, and they can honestly say without exaggeration that they’re at the top of their game right now.
Yet there are signs that the significant others of the Bigs (ie, consumers) are looking in other places for much more than just a pity date. Consumers seem to … for lack of a better word… “like” the experience of buying their stuff from unique, independently owned businesses. Like scrappy print publishers with freewheeling twitter accounts, Or chatty but somewhat curmudgeonly small retailers. Or ski areas that aren’t owned by Vail. Receipts don’t lie, and in this year of supply chain issues and soaring DTC customer acquisition costs, it seems that businesses centered around service may be in a stronger spot for ongoing growth than those dependent on nothing but scale.
Reads: More Glossies Launched in 2021 (NY Post, LINK); Independent retailers up 29% for 2021 (Outside Business Journal, LINK); “The Rise of the Local Hill” (Mountain Magazine, LINK)
2) “Modernist digital lifestyles” vs. “Luddite daydreaming”
For those unlucky enough to have heard me soapboxing somewhere on Zoom, one of my least favorite words of the pandemic has been “pivot.” It’s a dumb word, with no real meaning aside from being shorthand for either “lets shift everything to digital” or even worse, “lets pay you less for the same work.”
Yet pivot we did, making deals and diving into the open swim of the Zoom pool, finding ways to slash expenses and keep the heartbeat of our businesses alive through the magic of the digital world. We’ve bought service subscriptions, we’ve boosted our data storage, and we’ve racked up new devices – oh, the devices! – as proven by the staggering new number of charging cables in that kitchen junk drawer.
There’s little evidence that this digital lifestyle is going away anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t fantasizing about it. And that fantasy is going to start being more visible. Moving into 2022, as we continue to drown in digital time, the world of the unplugged – both directly and vicariously – will surely score a couple late game touchdowns to make things much, much closer.
Reads: “Led by the fiction categories, unit sales of print books rose 8.9% in 2021” (Publisher’s Weekly, LINK); Can the Movie make a Box Office comeback (Forbes, LINK); 76% of Millennials plan to Garden More (Greenhouse Product News, LINK)
3) Dogs vs. cats
“Dogs are winners,” Roger Sterling, “Mad Men.”
If there was an animal totem for the pandemic shutdown, it was surely a cat. No other animal better represents languishing on the couch and a steady slow slide toward deteriorating social skills.
Yet as the pandemic shifts to endemic – or whatever it’s called when we get sick of wearing masks – the pet icon will shift from shy kitty to a big, slobbery dumb dog. It just wants to be outside, it just wants to go on a road trip, and it just wants to stick its head out the window and feel the fresh air flapping its gums around.
Reads: “Pet Industry Sales Surpass $100 billion for first time, (Supermarket News, LINK); “11 Scientific Reasons Dogs are Better than Cats,” (Business Insider, LINK);
4) The Gold Coast vs. the Rise of Anywhere
In all the HR conversations that are going on around the country, there is considerable and understandable hand wringing about the millions of people who just. Aren’t. Coming. Back. To. The. Office.
Which sucks if you’re a big company sitting on big overhead for rent and desks and strangely powerful IT people … but if you’re a worker bee, it feels like a whole new world.
One short-term impact of “work from anywhere” has been the upending of real estate markets in rural outdoorsy towns (like mine). Remote workers can easily make six or seven times more than traditional ski town jobs (LINK), which in the math of real estate scarcity makes them about a billion times more likely to own a home than the kid that tunes skis and makes your burritos.
A longer term impact is what this rearrangement of workers will do to that thing we used to call “job markets.” Those days of living on the “gold coast” of whatever industry you thought was important may be slipping away, and so will the steakhouses and country clubs where new business was found and livers went to die. As anywhere becomes the new hot place, away goes the era of Geographic entitlement.
Reads: “40% of workers would rather quit than go back to the office” (Business Insider, LINK); “Are small towns the next big thing?” (American Public Power, LINK); “Coworking spaces worldwide projected to surpass 40,000 by 2024” (Crisis Management Update, LINK).
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