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Turning Corner

There is a hair salon less than a mile from my home. T's has been a fixture in the neighborhood for over three decades.  T is an immigrant and has struggled mightily to get to this point. He works six days a week and is on his feet eight hours a day. Last time I was there he told me how hard it was to run the place without help. I asked him where his usual crew was since I did not see most for the hairdressers I was familiar with. According to T, commuting for the job was not working out for many of them because gas was so expensive. They had set up shop in their own homes and some had moved on to other jobs that paid better. He was forever short-staffed and could not keep up with the demand. The wait times had grown much longer. That was also the first time that T did a bad job with my hair. So bad infact that I would have gone to another place to set it right had it not also been too short for such correction. I had to wait it out a couple of months, until it was long enough to fix. 

I want to support T because he is so hard-working and gracious to his customers. But comes a point when good intention does not go far enough in business. When T is stretched to the point where he cannot perform the basic function of the business he is running, then all other considerations go out the window unfortunately. I will likely not return there and I am afraid other loyal customers may do the same over time. It will be a natural balancing between what capacity he has left to serve and how many are looking to be served. Reading about Walmart's site re-design to compete with Amazon, brought T to mind. I wasn't sure why at first and then it occurred to me that it has to do with being scrappy, thrifty and really caring about customers to get to the top and then losing the plot in degrees by force of circumstance perhaps - maybe by becoming a victim to the success as T has been.

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