with respect to failure rates of small businesses, another factor which cannot be discounted is the internet.
alot of food businesses are doing just fine, if not better, along with other hospitality and tourism based ventures.
consumers are saving money by buying cheap foreign goods over the net, which is leading to a shakeout of the weaker business models. not necessarily a bad thing.
most people eventually revert back to in store shopping for a number of reasons, which will hopefully leave us with a more efficient commercial platform on which to base our social model.
most people would agree that modern society in general is a wasteful and inefficient operation. anyone with more than a few years of experience in the markets would have witnessed the vast amounts of money being spent on exploration/research/consumer goods which end up leading nowhere and only serve to keep a few fatcats flying around the country eating at the best restaurants and drinking overpriced wine.
this is just a crystallized version of what our society in general has become.
do we really need 10 shops on every high street selling us different brand name jeans and boardshorts?
do we really need 30 different telco's ringing us up every day trying to middleman us the same product?
is it smart to waste all our hard earned dollars investing in mineral projects that will NEVER go to production?
is it smart to build real estate that nobody needs, thus leading to pyramid schemes waiting to fail?
blaming the banks and the government overlooks the root of the problem. own greed is our worst enemy. the banks just take advantage of it, and the government can never appease it without pushing the problem onto somebody else.
but judging from the endless number of whinger tirades on hotcopper playing the blame game, i think we are still some way from collectively admitting this, and therefore we have some way down yet to go.
so buckle up, think lean, and evolve. survival of the fittest is being restored to order
