Cuidado com as explicações generalistas simplistas

Nos últimos anos temos lido aqui e acolá acerca do regresso do vinil, do regresso da cassete, do regresso da livraria, do regresso dos jogos de tabuleiro.

Há dias numa reunião alguém defendia uma tese muito interessante, contrária ao senso comum do mainstream, acerca da decadência, ou antes, acerca das causas da decadência nas vendas de um produto supostamente vítima da internet.

Lembrei-me logo dessa reunião ao ler:

"IN GRANITE CITY, ILLINOIS, a sleepy town of 29,000 where the laws of time seem not to apply, a just-opened Family Video storefront beckons customers with signs promoting the latest Hollywood blockbusters. Inside, long rows of DVDs line aisles festooned with placards offering two movie rentals for a dollar, and at the register a smiling cashier greets regulars by name.
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Hoogland insists that Family Video had no trouble competing with bigger players, [Moi ici: Blockbuster e Movie Gallery] and he sees few parallels between those companies and his own. “Everybody thought the reason they went away was because of digital,” he says. “But in reality that wasn’t the case. They weren’t very well-run businesses. They had a lot of debt, leases that were poorly negotiated, and they also were sharing revenue with studios quite a bit. They made a lot of poor decisions.”
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Family Video has taken a different approach. Instead of accepting discounted movies in exchange for agreements to split revenue, as Blockbuster did, it has opted to buy films outright and keep 100% of rental proceeds, which has paid off in the long run. Hoogland has also kept his stores entirely company-owned, and he keeps costs down by making many of the items needed for new locations in-house—everything from shelving to point-of-sale software. Most important, though, the company owns just about all the real estate underpinning its stores. As a result, Hoogland has been able to adapt now that sales are beginning to fall. He has shrunk the square footage of many of the video stores, put up drywall and leased out space to other companies, like Subway and H&R Block.
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He has also experimented with ventures of his own, using his properties to launch 11 fitness centers, an electronics-repair chain called Digital Doc and 149 Marco’s Pizza franchises (making him the brand’s single largest franchisee)."

O digital reduz a procura mas essa redução pode ser atenuada com uma gestão inteligente e fazendo da loja uma plataforma para vários negócios.

Trechos retirados de "The Last Video Chain: The Inside Story Of Family Video And Its $400 Million Owner"