The African-American Briefing to Understanding the Retail Solution Roadmap for Our Communities
In order for our communities to organically produce local jobs, local businesses and provide social responsibility, we have to succeed at creating economic sustainability. So in order to create economic sustainability to maintain a quality of life for our people, we will need to develop our commercial sectors as well as our manufacturing sectors.
Every large Black community in the United States has an established zone designed for both commercial and manufacturing activities and some date as far back as 100 years. This article is designed to brief brothas and sistas on the latest technology and techniques that can help us develop our retailing commercial sectors in our communities.
The good thing is while Black Enterprise magazine been around for decades, Urban League been around for decades, book writers and talkers been around for decades and elected Black politicians been around for decades doing nothing but wanting you to admire them, it took a hood cat from the West Side of Chicago plus the 30 Rotten Dissidents to actually put in the real framework to get something real going towards the goal of creating an environment for brothas and sistas to do for self, their community and their future.
The Real Barriers to Retailing in Our Communities
Mis-information. The first and true barrier to why we haven’t made real strides in our community is blatant misinformation from lazy sorry ass Black ancestors from the 70s and 80s generation who didn’t do sh*t but buy white-walled Cadillac sedans, wear afros, jerry curls and practiced fisting as a sexual activity and spread Hepatitis B among each other. Instead of going through the trial and error of developing businesses in our community, they instead blame Jews and then start blaming Arabs and Koreans instead of blaming their own lazy Black ass for not coming together and creating cooperative economics.
Chasing Jobs after College. So that leaves our current generation in the community with nothing to build upon and we starting from scratch, no thanks to our previous “Black power, Afro-American” generation. This leads to the second problem where instead of us being taught to open up businesses, we were taught to go to school and get a good job. So cats chasing driving a BMW 3-series and I’m hearing clowns saying “Black Man Working” like that is a status symbol, working for someone else. Then these corporate Negroes want to get mad at me and the 30 Rotten Dissidents because we just like Ma$E, Biggie and Puffy because we been around the world and drive Mercedes..baby, baby!
Clinton Years. So cats wanted to flash and focused on working a job and running to General Motors to drive the H2, Escalade EXT, and Yukon talking about how much they can afford a month to buy a $65,000 vehicle. Then they ran out to get these McMansions and ran out of the Black community and wanted me and you to visit their big house way out in the suburbs and check out their pool/bar in the basement but ain’t going to tell us they got an interest-only no-doc jumbo loan. So Black people got out of school, got jobs and didn’t reinvest in the community or young Black entrepreneurs and spent that money to brag on themselves.
Black Politicians. Another big barrier and the most serious were Black politicians being crooked and gatekeepers preventing Black entrepreneurs from serving their own people. See, the logic of these crooked and scumbag Black politicians if someone Black start a business and become successful, they may donate that money to their political opponent and they didn’t want to see that happen. So these scumbag politicians only hooked their own people up and wanted shakedown money and that’s why most of them are in federal prison doing time for corruption and taking bribes on camera, with their greedy self-serving behinds.
TIF Financing. There is a big problem I haven’t spoke of and that is TIF financing known as tax increment financing that occurred in several Black communities across the USA. What happened is the local government would claim to put an “advance” of tax collected in the Black community towards a new business and the new business would pay those taxes back. In other words, the Black community provided loans through their own real estate taxes and probably didn’t realize it. These TIF-financed businesses were not Black-owned or they were connected by Black politicians and did not serve the community or generated income to pay back the taxes!
Putting Black Taxpayers in Debt. Why is this TIF crap serious!? Because that TIF tax money used as a loan to a private entity need to be paid back and that means what the local government will do is take the money from the Black community and instead of fund schools and parks, pay back that TIF that was given out to some business that never served the Black community. This is exactly how the International Monetary Fund f*cked over Haiti, Jamaica and other Black nations to keep them in debt, giving money to crooked politicians who built pet projects and left the people owing the money back to the IMF.
So these are the issues we identified as the cause of why we have not made the economic progress we Black folks should have made to self-empower ourselves in our communities. However, the economy collapse and shut most of the ignorant crap down that cats were about but the damage was done to the community where there was no economic development. The reality brothas and sistas are still at zero because we have not developed our communities to be sustainable. So let’s look at the solutions.
Strategy for Success
Despite of all of the issues we just listed, we going to have to do something and doing nothing is not an option. While Black Enterprise magazine busy generating ego-reinforcing top 100 lists and putting out slide shows, Dream and Hustle and the 30 Rotten Dissidents canvas the world physically and virtually for retailing solutions we can apply to our hoods. We spent our time and money and we went worldwide specifically for the Black community, the hood for brothas and sistas. What we gathered at the strategy for developing our commercial zones in the hood is the following.
Infrastructure Revitalization. We are going to need to revitalize our buildings in the hood or quite frankly, tear them down. Many of the buildings have lead and asbestos and you can’t demolish these buildings for that reason alone to avoid infecting the air in the hood. Second, we are going to need more modern electrical wiring and more powerful grids for the community. This is something that can be financed and should have been done by the Housing and Urban Development a long time ago. This is one of our biggest financial barriers that require the capital but it is not impossible to achieve.
Attract Huge Foot Traffic. What drives me nuts is the Black communities in US metropolitan cities have the same mass transit infrastructure as the biggest GDP cities in the world from Tokyo to London. Our Black community can push hundreds of thousands of foot traffic in and out of our commercial sectors in our communities every day! So we have the pipeline and capacity but we need a reason to bring them in. That means we going to need special kind of shops and make our commercial zones a place for people to want to go visit.
Promote Safety. The commercial sector in the hood is prone to brazen crime due to various elements such as few stores to look out for each other, just a few beat cops and cameras that only record only when crime is in progress and police reviewing the tapes later. It takes hood cats to know how hood cats operate and we believe there are several elements to create a security framework to make it safe for people to shop and do business in our community and this is still a secret project within the 30 Rotten Dissidents laboratory. All I’m going to say is smart cameras and land-based drones with artificial intelligence and leave it at that.
State of the Art Point of Sale. One of the biggest thing that stuck out at me as I interviewed and got a chance to visit hood-based business in different cities was the point-of-sale was basically an old fashion single cash register with a merchant card processing machine attached to a phone jack. In addition, I found point of sale systems to be extremely expensive around $2,000 and even those systems are not robust! What I have done was commissioned a development project to create a point of sale system for the hood that is robust to commercial point of sale products to increase scalability of transactions because that is extremely important to taking the hood commercial zones to the next level.
Technology and Methodology
While we did our homework worldwide on retailing and commerce in other high density urban areas worldwide, we also noticed various business models and practices that were not being done in our hoods that were working well in these other communities. Here are some things we found.
Economic Clustering. In Asia and the Middle East and Africa which are home to the earliest markets, we noticed the same type of business all concentrated in one area. All these years, we been hearing Black Enterprise magazine say some nonsense about we shouldn’t open the same kind of business next to each other. That’s the biggest lie ever told in Black business history. We should open the same kind of business right next to each other and create economic clusters. In fact, we found economic clusters to be the most effective economic development strategy and it been done since markets were created during the Biblical times.
Showrooming and Catalog Merchants. These are retailing business models still active in Europe and Asia were inventory is not present on site but a showroom is there. Kinda like Skymall, but if you ever flew Singapore Airlines, Korea Air, Japan Airlines you will see they still do the catalog merchant model. Think of the Lamborghini or Rolls Royce dealer where they only have the model car in the showroom but you have to order it from the manufacturer. Or the furniture showroom or buying a household appliance like a fridge or washer. But in the hood, we can use drop shipping techniques, home delivery techniques to sell consumer products in the same manner. Keep in mind that cats don’t want to be walking home in the hood with the latest shoes in their bag – you know how that will turn out. Instead of cats driving out to the suburban mall, we can do drop-shipping or delivery to their home and they do business in the community.
Micro-Distributors. These are actually outsourced distribution centers that focus on logistics of products and use the same technology like Amazon.com and other major distributors. They don’t have to hold millions of products but can hold a few hundred thousand and employ cats in the local community to move products to retailers. The hood already have these kind of spots, they just converted them into lofts in some areas. These small businesses can do everything to replenish vending machines, ship the product to the consumer mailing address or slotting of products.
IPTV and Digital Signage. This is probably the biggest economic opportunity that needs skilled workers in the Black community who understand how to create media content and distribute media content. Jumbo screens will be established in our communities to showcase products and media for outdoor public viewing and draw customers to the area as a focal point of the commercial center. Many products now require videos to demonstrate in order to catch up. Once we develop media for a product, we can distribute that video to many retail outlets in other hoods to play. Keep in mind that Nigeria may be a cheaper market to produce Black-orientated media than America.
Mobile-Commerce. The best thing that happened to the hood-based business is we never got good merchant card processing rates or been outright rejected. So what that leaves many hood-based merchants are wide open to start accepting mobile payments from customers who probably don’t have credit cards and been denied credit and debit cards and bank accounts. Just like the M-Pesa model, the currency exchanges or even an office can be setup to take deposits and handle withdrawals into these stored valued accounts to shop at local merchants. I still do not understand why no one who read Dream and Hustle didn’t do anything knowing this is a multi-billionaire hustle in an untapped market.
Retailing Models
One of the things brothas and sistas in the 21st century need to realize is we cannot build the same type of stores that are elsewhere like in the suburban malls. We are going to have to build retail stores that accommodate the hood and our unique situation. Some of the popular and more recent retailing models we have seen being done worldwide are pop-up retailing, concept stores, small format retailing and entertainment to support traffic.
Pop-Up Retailing. One of the biggest mistakes we are seeing are stores keep buying inventory that don’t sell and have to buy new inventory to stock for next season. These are heavy losses and usually the high margin items make up for the loss in low margin items or the slotting fees make up for the losses. But the hood entrepreneur cannot afford to take these kinds of risks. A smarter approach in the hood is the use of pop-up retailing where temporary stores are created to sell inventory until it is gone. This also keeps the retailing commercial sector fresh with new products and stores instead of the same businesses in the same community all the time.
Concept Stores. A concept store is what you see in many large cities with stores like Louie Vuitton, Burberry, Sony Store or any type of business that calls the store a flagship store. Here is the thing – these are the type of stores we need to develop for the hood and nothing less. Anything less than a concept store in the hood is uncivilized and will fail. We know we have to come hard with retailing when we do it and we bring it. So we got to create stores that are designed to create a huge experience and operate and look just as luxurious as any Gucci or Apple flagship store out there.
Small Format Retailing. These are stores packed with products and under 1000 square feet. The key to small format retailing is having micro-distributors and retail-time tracking of inventory to know what to keep in stock and what sell and don’t sell. Many people will think of bodegas and that is correct – but more intelligent in terms of computer science to know what sells and don’t and be able to rely inventory information to keep profit optimization in real time. I was told a smaller aquarium is hard to manage than a large one and the same goes for retail stores in terms of their size.
Entertainment Support. If you look at commercial zones in the Black community, they do not have “fun” places to just go and hang out. What is needed to create foot traffic are micro-arenas for performance, museums featuring local history or traveling exhibits and family orientated games like airsoft and slot racing. It’s funny because I did an article on slot racing tracks in the hood and cats laughed at me – well, that shop is extremely profitable years later and those same cats still on the Internet talking at another blog, what a joke they are. So these are the type of businesses that no one put in our community because they didn’t care about us and just wanted to blood suck us instead of turn our community into an attraction.
Summary
I know this was a lot but to be honest, we going to have to do a lot if we want to revitalize our community and create our own jobs and opportunities to stack paper and stop relying on bigots to bail us out. And to be honest and we need to swallow the truth, it’s going to take radical thinking to get it done.
While we got some challenges, the homework been done and we got a lot ahead of us. We can create the connections and the supply, we can ramp up stores with creativity and open source software and we can create a cluster and diversity in our high density areas to attract crowds with the goal of converting into customers making transactions.
The only barrier we got are cornballs running around with egos and pride and that is a serious problem in the Black community. Cats who are thinking about making themselves look important or better than other Blacks and smiling their ass off in Black Enterprise magazine. But we got to look out for these kids and the best thing we can do to send a message to our previous generation of Blacks from the 70s and 80s is to show that generation that the current generation of brothas and sistas do give a sh*t and care about the young brothas and sistas coming up and their future and me and the 30 Rotten Dissidents are dedicated to making sure that message is sent.
http://dreamandhustle.com/2012/09/the-african-american-briefing-to-understanding-the-retail-solution-roadmap-for-our-communities/
In order for our communities to organically produce local jobs, local businesses and provide social responsibility, we have to succeed at creating economic sustainability. So in order to create economic sustainability to maintain a quality of life for our people, we will need to develop our commercial sectors as well as our manufacturing sectors.
Every large Black community in the United States has an established zone designed for both commercial and manufacturing activities and some date as far back as 100 years. This article is designed to brief brothas and sistas on the latest technology and techniques that can help us develop our retailing commercial sectors in our communities.
The good thing is while Black Enterprise magazine been around for decades, Urban League been around for decades, book writers and talkers been around for decades and elected Black politicians been around for decades doing nothing but wanting you to admire them, it took a hood cat from the West Side of Chicago plus the 30 Rotten Dissidents to actually put in the real framework to get something real going towards the goal of creating an environment for brothas and sistas to do for self, their community and their future.
The Real Barriers to Retailing in Our Communities
Mis-information. The first and true barrier to why we haven’t made real strides in our community is blatant misinformation from lazy sorry ass Black ancestors from the 70s and 80s generation who didn’t do sh*t but buy white-walled Cadillac sedans, wear afros, jerry curls and practiced fisting as a sexual activity and spread Hepatitis B among each other. Instead of going through the trial and error of developing businesses in our community, they instead blame Jews and then start blaming Arabs and Koreans instead of blaming their own lazy Black ass for not coming together and creating cooperative economics.
Chasing Jobs after College. So that leaves our current generation in the community with nothing to build upon and we starting from scratch, no thanks to our previous “Black power, Afro-American” generation. This leads to the second problem where instead of us being taught to open up businesses, we were taught to go to school and get a good job. So cats chasing driving a BMW 3-series and I’m hearing clowns saying “Black Man Working” like that is a status symbol, working for someone else. Then these corporate Negroes want to get mad at me and the 30 Rotten Dissidents because we just like Ma$E, Biggie and Puffy because we been around the world and drive Mercedes..baby, baby!
Clinton Years. So cats wanted to flash and focused on working a job and running to General Motors to drive the H2, Escalade EXT, and Yukon talking about how much they can afford a month to buy a $65,000 vehicle. Then they ran out to get these McMansions and ran out of the Black community and wanted me and you to visit their big house way out in the suburbs and check out their pool/bar in the basement but ain’t going to tell us they got an interest-only no-doc jumbo loan. So Black people got out of school, got jobs and didn’t reinvest in the community or young Black entrepreneurs and spent that money to brag on themselves.
Black Politicians. Another big barrier and the most serious were Black politicians being crooked and gatekeepers preventing Black entrepreneurs from serving their own people. See, the logic of these crooked and scumbag Black politicians if someone Black start a business and become successful, they may donate that money to their political opponent and they didn’t want to see that happen. So these scumbag politicians only hooked their own people up and wanted shakedown money and that’s why most of them are in federal prison doing time for corruption and taking bribes on camera, with their greedy self-serving behinds.
TIF Financing. There is a big problem I haven’t spoke of and that is TIF financing known as tax increment financing that occurred in several Black communities across the USA. What happened is the local government would claim to put an “advance” of tax collected in the Black community towards a new business and the new business would pay those taxes back. In other words, the Black community provided loans through their own real estate taxes and probably didn’t realize it. These TIF-financed businesses were not Black-owned or they were connected by Black politicians and did not serve the community or generated income to pay back the taxes!
Putting Black Taxpayers in Debt. Why is this TIF crap serious!? Because that TIF tax money used as a loan to a private entity need to be paid back and that means what the local government will do is take the money from the Black community and instead of fund schools and parks, pay back that TIF that was given out to some business that never served the Black community. This is exactly how the International Monetary Fund f*cked over Haiti, Jamaica and other Black nations to keep them in debt, giving money to crooked politicians who built pet projects and left the people owing the money back to the IMF.
So these are the issues we identified as the cause of why we have not made the economic progress we Black folks should have made to self-empower ourselves in our communities. However, the economy collapse and shut most of the ignorant crap down that cats were about but the damage was done to the community where there was no economic development. The reality brothas and sistas are still at zero because we have not developed our communities to be sustainable. So let’s look at the solutions.
Strategy for Success
Despite of all of the issues we just listed, we going to have to do something and doing nothing is not an option. While Black Enterprise magazine busy generating ego-reinforcing top 100 lists and putting out slide shows, Dream and Hustle and the 30 Rotten Dissidents canvas the world physically and virtually for retailing solutions we can apply to our hoods. We spent our time and money and we went worldwide specifically for the Black community, the hood for brothas and sistas. What we gathered at the strategy for developing our commercial zones in the hood is the following.
Infrastructure Revitalization. We are going to need to revitalize our buildings in the hood or quite frankly, tear them down. Many of the buildings have lead and asbestos and you can’t demolish these buildings for that reason alone to avoid infecting the air in the hood. Second, we are going to need more modern electrical wiring and more powerful grids for the community. This is something that can be financed and should have been done by the Housing and Urban Development a long time ago. This is one of our biggest financial barriers that require the capital but it is not impossible to achieve.
Attract Huge Foot Traffic. What drives me nuts is the Black communities in US metropolitan cities have the same mass transit infrastructure as the biggest GDP cities in the world from Tokyo to London. Our Black community can push hundreds of thousands of foot traffic in and out of our commercial sectors in our communities every day! So we have the pipeline and capacity but we need a reason to bring them in. That means we going to need special kind of shops and make our commercial zones a place for people to want to go visit.
Promote Safety. The commercial sector in the hood is prone to brazen crime due to various elements such as few stores to look out for each other, just a few beat cops and cameras that only record only when crime is in progress and police reviewing the tapes later. It takes hood cats to know how hood cats operate and we believe there are several elements to create a security framework to make it safe for people to shop and do business in our community and this is still a secret project within the 30 Rotten Dissidents laboratory. All I’m going to say is smart cameras and land-based drones with artificial intelligence and leave it at that.
State of the Art Point of Sale. One of the biggest thing that stuck out at me as I interviewed and got a chance to visit hood-based business in different cities was the point-of-sale was basically an old fashion single cash register with a merchant card processing machine attached to a phone jack. In addition, I found point of sale systems to be extremely expensive around $2,000 and even those systems are not robust! What I have done was commissioned a development project to create a point of sale system for the hood that is robust to commercial point of sale products to increase scalability of transactions because that is extremely important to taking the hood commercial zones to the next level.
Technology and Methodology
While we did our homework worldwide on retailing and commerce in other high density urban areas worldwide, we also noticed various business models and practices that were not being done in our hoods that were working well in these other communities. Here are some things we found.
Economic Clustering. In Asia and the Middle East and Africa which are home to the earliest markets, we noticed the same type of business all concentrated in one area. All these years, we been hearing Black Enterprise magazine say some nonsense about we shouldn’t open the same kind of business next to each other. That’s the biggest lie ever told in Black business history. We should open the same kind of business right next to each other and create economic clusters. In fact, we found economic clusters to be the most effective economic development strategy and it been done since markets were created during the Biblical times.
Showrooming and Catalog Merchants. These are retailing business models still active in Europe and Asia were inventory is not present on site but a showroom is there. Kinda like Skymall, but if you ever flew Singapore Airlines, Korea Air, Japan Airlines you will see they still do the catalog merchant model. Think of the Lamborghini or Rolls Royce dealer where they only have the model car in the showroom but you have to order it from the manufacturer. Or the furniture showroom or buying a household appliance like a fridge or washer. But in the hood, we can use drop shipping techniques, home delivery techniques to sell consumer products in the same manner. Keep in mind that cats don’t want to be walking home in the hood with the latest shoes in their bag – you know how that will turn out. Instead of cats driving out to the suburban mall, we can do drop-shipping or delivery to their home and they do business in the community.
Micro-Distributors. These are actually outsourced distribution centers that focus on logistics of products and use the same technology like Amazon.com and other major distributors. They don’t have to hold millions of products but can hold a few hundred thousand and employ cats in the local community to move products to retailers. The hood already have these kind of spots, they just converted them into lofts in some areas. These small businesses can do everything to replenish vending machines, ship the product to the consumer mailing address or slotting of products.
IPTV and Digital Signage. This is probably the biggest economic opportunity that needs skilled workers in the Black community who understand how to create media content and distribute media content. Jumbo screens will be established in our communities to showcase products and media for outdoor public viewing and draw customers to the area as a focal point of the commercial center. Many products now require videos to demonstrate in order to catch up. Once we develop media for a product, we can distribute that video to many retail outlets in other hoods to play. Keep in mind that Nigeria may be a cheaper market to produce Black-orientated media than America.
Mobile-Commerce. The best thing that happened to the hood-based business is we never got good merchant card processing rates or been outright rejected. So what that leaves many hood-based merchants are wide open to start accepting mobile payments from customers who probably don’t have credit cards and been denied credit and debit cards and bank accounts. Just like the M-Pesa model, the currency exchanges or even an office can be setup to take deposits and handle withdrawals into these stored valued accounts to shop at local merchants. I still do not understand why no one who read Dream and Hustle didn’t do anything knowing this is a multi-billionaire hustle in an untapped market.
Retailing Models
One of the things brothas and sistas in the 21st century need to realize is we cannot build the same type of stores that are elsewhere like in the suburban malls. We are going to have to build retail stores that accommodate the hood and our unique situation. Some of the popular and more recent retailing models we have seen being done worldwide are pop-up retailing, concept stores, small format retailing and entertainment to support traffic.
Pop-Up Retailing. One of the biggest mistakes we are seeing are stores keep buying inventory that don’t sell and have to buy new inventory to stock for next season. These are heavy losses and usually the high margin items make up for the loss in low margin items or the slotting fees make up for the losses. But the hood entrepreneur cannot afford to take these kinds of risks. A smarter approach in the hood is the use of pop-up retailing where temporary stores are created to sell inventory until it is gone. This also keeps the retailing commercial sector fresh with new products and stores instead of the same businesses in the same community all the time.
Concept Stores. A concept store is what you see in many large cities with stores like Louie Vuitton, Burberry, Sony Store or any type of business that calls the store a flagship store. Here is the thing – these are the type of stores we need to develop for the hood and nothing less. Anything less than a concept store in the hood is uncivilized and will fail. We know we have to come hard with retailing when we do it and we bring it. So we got to create stores that are designed to create a huge experience and operate and look just as luxurious as any Gucci or Apple flagship store out there.
Small Format Retailing. These are stores packed with products and under 1000 square feet. The key to small format retailing is having micro-distributors and retail-time tracking of inventory to know what to keep in stock and what sell and don’t sell. Many people will think of bodegas and that is correct – but more intelligent in terms of computer science to know what sells and don’t and be able to rely inventory information to keep profit optimization in real time. I was told a smaller aquarium is hard to manage than a large one and the same goes for retail stores in terms of their size.
Entertainment Support. If you look at commercial zones in the Black community, they do not have “fun” places to just go and hang out. What is needed to create foot traffic are micro-arenas for performance, museums featuring local history or traveling exhibits and family orientated games like airsoft and slot racing. It’s funny because I did an article on slot racing tracks in the hood and cats laughed at me – well, that shop is extremely profitable years later and those same cats still on the Internet talking at another blog, what a joke they are. So these are the type of businesses that no one put in our community because they didn’t care about us and just wanted to blood suck us instead of turn our community into an attraction.
Summary
I know this was a lot but to be honest, we going to have to do a lot if we want to revitalize our community and create our own jobs and opportunities to stack paper and stop relying on bigots to bail us out. And to be honest and we need to swallow the truth, it’s going to take radical thinking to get it done.
While we got some challenges, the homework been done and we got a lot ahead of us. We can create the connections and the supply, we can ramp up stores with creativity and open source software and we can create a cluster and diversity in our high density areas to attract crowds with the goal of converting into customers making transactions.
The only barrier we got are cornballs running around with egos and pride and that is a serious problem in the Black community. Cats who are thinking about making themselves look important or better than other Blacks and smiling their ass off in Black Enterprise magazine. But we got to look out for these kids and the best thing we can do to send a message to our previous generation of Blacks from the 70s and 80s is to show that generation that the current generation of brothas and sistas do give a sh*t and care about the young brothas and sistas coming up and their future and me and the 30 Rotten Dissidents are dedicated to making sure that message is sent.
http://dreamandhustle.com/2012/09/the-african-american-briefing-to-understanding-the-retail-solution-roadmap-for-our-communities/
