sirocyl

("Packie" = New England dialect for liquor stores)

I think about this all the time, because it shows up everywhere. I feel like every single thing I work on at Large Computer Corp jobplace has this metric applied to it, which is bananas because sometimes you just want to organize a wiki for 10 people, and needing to justify that in terms of “productivity growth” eats at your soul.

If you're not a small local business it's because you're already kinda built around growing past that point, and it's rare albeit not totally unheard of to start out with a business model of aggressive expansion and reinvesting in new franchises then just decide to stop doing that as soon as you've started to succeed.

There are plenty of niche businesses with a pretty low possible ceiling to growth, that expand to fill all possible space in that model and then just keep doing that without either pivoting to trying to be the next Amazon or immediately dying from a failure to do so. The country's biggest wet plate collodion supplier is not going to ever become a multibillion dollar empire but they nevertheless exist and are doin' fine. The all-consuming conglomerates that talk about exponential growth for all eternity rarely actually do anything but subcontract and resell the work of these middling businesses, occasionally they'll buy one and immediately ruin it because they're not equipped to run a business that does anything.