👨💻 permanently wfh.
on the agenda this week: permanently wfh, how movement is changing, and the fall of j.c. penney.
📖 reading time: 5m 24s.
fig. 1. sunset last week from my apartment.
😌 hey, hi, & happy monday.
i hope the past week has been kind to you.
i quietly enabled paid subscriptions on this newsletter just over a week ago.
two very lovely people have already signed up at the princely sum of €30 a year. that means i’ve increased my monthly salary by a not-to-be-scoffed at €5 MRR.
fig. 2. strictly confidential financial metrics.
ok, you can scoff at that. but still. i really appreciate the support. it gives me a little pep in my step, knowing that somebody cares enough to pay me to write.
you get absolutely nothing for signing up to a paid subscription, i’m keeping this newsletter free forever.
you can, however, buy me a coffee every month by upgrading your subscription here:
on the agenda this week:
permanently wfh, how movement is changing, and the fall of j.c. penney.
as always, feel free to skip any section that doesn’t interest you or reply directly to this email to provide me with feedback.
⚡️ tag me on instagram or follow me on twitter if you enjoy this week's brain drain!
📝 a note on: permanently wfh.
a topic that has been to the forefront of my mind over the past few has been the concept of working from home or working “remotely”.
it seems that this pandemic has finally caused a permanent shift to allow those who can work from home, to do so.
in the u.s., however, some 65 percent of jobs aren’t compatible with this new modus vivendi. lower-income workers who can’t work remotely — like shop staff & warehouse pickers — face a dangerous reality in the immediate future. this comes amidst a raft of announcements from technology companies who have the capability to adapt rapidly — like twitter — allowing employees to work from home; permanently.
i can only imagine that commercial property developers in areas like sf, new york or hong kong are a little nervous for a future where businesses continue to downsize or reevaluate the need for all of their office space. maybe offices will reshape to become areas for collaboration & engagement with others rather than mere workday habitation. entire cities are shaped by the need to ferry workers to and from office buildings. railways, bus corridors and motorways.
if we don’t go back to the offices, what will cities look like?
maybe something akin to what a company i wrote about in november — culdesac—are trying to build.
📚 word of the week:
“dishabille”.
the state of being dressed in a careless, disheveled, or disorderly style or manner; undress.
there are town houses, and yes, many prominent people hold the deeds to them because they don’t want to be seen in dishabille scooping up the morning paper.
- new york times, 2012
🤪 mildly humorous:
outtakes from the twitter-sphere.
🧠 brain candy:
🚶♂️
movement is changing
.
more than 1 billion people worldwide use google maps to navigate places they live and travel. google have now release “mobility reports”, a massive amount of anonymised data tracking the movements of people around the world. it has launched for 131 countries and shows how people are now moving around cities.
the insights are created with aggregated, anonymised sets of data from users who have turned on the location history setting, which is off by default,” google adds.
as global communities respond to covid-19, we've heard from public health officials that the same type of aggregated, anonymized insights we use in products such as google maps could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat covid-19.
these community mobility reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating covid-19. the reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.
👉 read more via google.
🛍
the fall of j.c. penney
.
j.c. penney filed for bankruptcy last friday. in 1994, they pioneered an ecommerce model with email-based catalogue sales. in 1998, they joined the online shopping era with jcpenney dot com.
so how did a brand that preceded even jeff bezos’ amazon in the world of ecommerce marketplaces fail so terribly?
the downfall of j.c. penney — a chain that grew out of a single store opened 118 years ago in kemmerer, wyoming by james cash penney — is part and parcel with the long, slow decline of the department store. the concept had its heyday from the end of the second world war through to the 1980s. often starting life downtown as americans moved to the suburbs, these venerable names followed, opening in newly built malls. they focused largely on clothing and the items needed to furnish the homes that americans were buying. amid the age of mass car ownership, they were more than happy to drive to these retail attractions.
the mid-market, which j.c. penney had traditionally occupied, was under attack, not just from discounters, but later the internet, which was rapidly displacing department stores as the one-stop shop, and with cheaper, more transparent pricing.
by 2011, in an effort to reinvent itself, j.c. penney appointed ron johnson, an executive from apple inc. who built the tech giant’s much-admired retail network. some of his ideas – a communal space in stores for yoga classes and coffee bars and food stands dotted throughout – were directionally right, even if they never got off the ground. other concepts did come to fruition and were disastrous, such as ditching the coupons that had driven much of j.c. penney’s traffic.
when johnson was ousted in 2013, the company apologized to customers in a television commercial: “we learned a very simple thing – to listen to you,” it said in the ad. “come back to j.c. penney.” unfortunately, they never did to the same extent.
👉 read more via the washington post.
👂 earworm: bearcubs.
“going round and round
we’re just following the circle
without a care in the world
when it’s just me and you
it’s hard to feel like anything else matters”
stream now:
this is a tangled day dream of different experiences…transient relationships, friendships lost and gained again, loneliness in the city, the hazy euphoria of partying and being up till the early hours with your friends around you, thoughts of the real world out of mind.
- onestowatch.
listen to bearcubs on spotify or on apple music.
🦶 footer:
did you know that word of mouth is the only way something like this grows?
tell one of your colleagues what they’re missing out on.
they can sign up here.
🚨 if you post a screenshot to instagram stories of your favourite part of the email & tag me (@sam.travel), i’ll repost the best ones.
you can also support me but upgrading to a paid (€5 a month, it’s the lowest price i can charge on this platform) subscription:
🎉 get social:
instagram: @sam.travel
twitter: @sammcallister
email me: smcallis[at]gmail.com
website: sammcallister.me
👋 read one of my last 5 posts:
🏠 isolation.
🖼 the art of money laundering.
or click to see them all.