The Austerity Opportunity

Anyone remotely interested in the environment has known for some time that the disposable society and our general way of living is pretty much unsustainable for much longer.   However as much as eco warriors and the various ‘Green parties’ across the world shouted the more people didn’t want to listen.

One of the main problems was that we were all too well off,  sure we all worried about the environment a little.  But surely it didn’t matter if we just treated ourselves to that new laptop, latest Iphone, foreign holiday etc, etc.   The problem of course was that all our economies were based on throwing away and consuming – endlessly and relentlessly replacing perfectly good items because a shiny new model had come into existence.

I’ve been told that not so long ago you could pick up a top of the range LCD TV from a rubbish tip in Tokyo with ease – purely because the model was 12 months old.   It’s not surprising that our economic model has collapsed – it was quite clearly unsustainable in the long run.

So now to the title of this post – the Austerity Opportunity and it comes from a discussion I had with a cobbler the other week.   Now we all of course know what a cobbler is but I wonder how many use their services regularly – there used to be loads in my home town – now I can think of only one.

Are they All Broken?

Do people repair shoes anymore or merely dispose and replace?  The cobbler was fairly certain that very few people did repair shoes compared with 30 years ago.   He told me about recently he had bought a special machine which was able to repair running and training shoes perfectly.  But after 12 months of virtual none-use he sent the machine back.   Nobody repaired trainers or sports shoes – they just bought new ones.

But this is where there will be an opportunity – to make business that repair, recycle and reuse rather than just throwing on the landfill sites.   When cash is short people will want to spend a few pennies repairing their trainers rather simply to save money.  They’ll make do, and reuse and recycle things increasingly.   Any businesses that tap into this austerity market and embrace the concepts could end up doing very well.

I wonder how many cobblers are looking at these sport shoe repairing machines again, or how many eco friendly business opportunities the world financial crisis will actually end up bringing.  It’s certainly a good opportunity to start any sort of business which will enable people to genuinely save money and help them to reduce, reuse and recycle.

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