On the Restaurant Industry, the Newspaper Industry, and Other Symbiotic Industries

Every morning when I wake up, the news comes to me.  It doesn’t slap onto my front porch at some ungodly hour (I’ve seen the weary travelers who deliver these newspapers in the morning, always the sign of a good night out).  It’s not delivered by a person to me.  I don’t even take the paper; I don’t have to go down to the corner, tipping hats at friends and acquaintances on my way to the corner store or newsstand to buy a daily edition (of which I actually have at least 3 options within walking distance).

But like I said, the news comes to me.  It bleeps onto my iPhone and my waking-up procedure has gone from a quick check to make sure there’s been no texts or calls to reading the entire contents of the Chicago Tribune iPhone app.

From this...

...To this

I’m more informed, better at parties, et cetera.  But what I’m not doing, necessarily, is heading down to the neighborhood diner to discuss the news with my closest friends over coffee.  Now obviously, mostly retired people do that, but back in high school, I would occasionally meet friends at a very old-school diner right by our high school before going in for the day.  We didn’t always discuss news, and the only papers offered were lousy local ones, but I digress.  The point is, anybody can do it.  It’s a community thing, not a news thing, or a restaurant thing (those greasy spoons weren’t worth the trip without the friends).

Now I’m aware that social media and new tech have killed a lot of industries, but I’m not sure if people foresaw neighborhood diners and breakfast places closing because everybody reads the news alone on their smartphones nowadays. But it’s certainly true – there was one right by my old apartment that drastically cut its hours in response to fewer customers; right in front of the restaurant, there was a dozen-long row of (mostly full) periodical cases and newspaper machines.  The juxtaposition got me thinking, and here we are.

My point is not really to lament the death of coffee klatches, it’s to comment on the secondary and tertiary casualties in this ‘new’ economy, ‘new’ media, ‘new’-just-about-everything world.  As a web designer and computer science student, and a person that’s infatuated with old Americana and had family members who love to talk about days gone by, I see a conflict forming between what I do in my work and how rapidly the world changes.  So much of what ‘makes men men’ and made the good old days the good old days has shifted due to my industry.  Maybe I’m so interested in all that stuff because someone has to eulogize it as it goes down.

So, in sum: Investors need to be aware that there can be crazy, completely unforeseen, domino effects on industries as seemingly intrenched and immovable as a breakfast diner.  It’s not a ‘brave new world’ or anything — this is more of a reminder.  You probably should have gotten out of telegraph-machine manufacturers in the 20s.  It’s not hard.  You just have to look a lot harder as an investor today.  Allowing myself to even make wild guesses about what location services like Foursquare mean for nightlife and entertainment industries seems impossible, but if I was investing, I’d have to be doing it.