A salesperson's lesson on growth

A number of years ago, I was in an internal training class with some of my colleagues. One guy in particular was a salesperson I had always thought of as being a bit shallow. Anyway, during a break in the class, I got into a discussion with him about the effect of Home Depot and moving commercial development out of city centers, putting Mom and Pop hardware stores out of business. And in the discussion he was, to my surprise, against a lot of that development. I was saying, you know, wasn't it a good thing that due to these superstores things could be cheaper and that people could buy more things? And I remember him saying in response: why do things need to be cheap, why do we need more things?

It really shocked me, because my assessment of him was way wrong. I had definitely not pegged him to be such a thoughtful person. I've remembered those words for more than 10 years and as I reflect on it now, his response and his thinking had a lot of the Buddhist in them.

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retail, growth, pricing, spoken post