Creative Destruction

From the Guardian

There's a fear that Cash's is about to join such names as Woolworths and Blockbuster on the great commercial scrapheap of the recession years. Cash's, that is, as in the humble nametape – as sewn for generations by loving mothers, and even occasionally loving fathers, into the clothes that their children take to school and will otherwise reliably lose, thus causing households to ring with the anguished cry "But this jumper is Veronica's!"

The company has not been the only maker of nametapes, yet somehow Cash and nametapes go together like Sloan and liniment or Robinson and barley water. But the triumph of the marker pen has made nametapes look like a 19th-century technology.

So why "fear"? We've decided that we like marker pens better than name tapes, and the suppliers of name tapes go to the wall. I sympathise with the plight of the employees, but what are we going to do? Keep them employed making tape that no-one wants? (actually, we prefer name tapes in our house, but we're not sustaining them).

People often write about companies hit by recession, but in a lot of cases, the recession was just the thing that tipped them over. Blockbuster was always going to go to the wall because streaming rentals are just more sensible than people driving to a store to collect and return movies. As a frequent customer years ago, I don't miss it.