Growing Nails

Everyone knows the two big growth areas in America are finger nails and coffee shops. But coffee isn’t hot anymore. Starbucks is closing shops down. What can you do after you have every street corner covered? You close low performers or do like Peets--sneak in tea. Read its full name sometime “Peets Coffee and Tea.” Tea is metro and hip and you pick your infusion (not just caffeine). So the curve is bending towards the tea guys. Just look at the SF (a culture leader, if there ever was one) tea house map.
But I don’t want to talk about drinking drugs today. I want to talk about nail shops. There are lots of them and they haven’t completely starbucked America yet. My prediction: nails have room to grow.
When I was a kid all the women I saw did their own nails. I remember moms and teenagers sitting on the porch with their wet toes shining bright red, sipping on a coke in the 100 degree summer heat, waiting for them ten guys to dry. Now it’s different. Do you know how many people do nails for someone else‘s feet? The census says 51,000 nail doers do it. And the Stats of US Businesses says 12,000 nail places were selling gels and acrylics and all sorts of nail stuff in 2008.
But I thought about it and the census number seems really wrong. I drove by more nail places than that last year.Look at the map of LA metro. Google shows 11,000 nail salons (That’s Google‘s term, not mine). So with about 20 million people that’s one nail shop for every 2000 people. If every shop has only 4 nail doers then that’s 1 nailer for every 500 folks (including old retired guys like me and babies too who don‘t do their nails often).
OK go ahead and argue that LA is nail happy and different from the rest of the US. So let’s look somewhere that doesn’t make you think about body parts right away--How about Casper Wyoming (I stuck my cursor in the map with my eyes shut to get it). I think boots and saddles for Casper, not nails and pedicures, but it has 23 nailerys for 50 thousand folks. That’s pretty close to the same as LA--one nail shop for every 2000 people.
So for the US with 300 million folks that means 150 thousand nail shops. And using my very conservative 4 nail doers per shop you get 600,000 nail doers.
We just need more growth companies like nail salons. Poofy dog shops are growing. Weird phone ringtones are hot. Two thousand dollar bikes with show-all tights are doing well. And all the old guys at the gym talk about how their wives like their snuggies.
America is on the move. Don't let those panhandlers standing around fool you

Fixing Us Up

I’ve been thinking about fixing up our goodbye-Bush crisis. He played patty-cake with those bankers doing old-time, laissez-faire, robber-baron, footsie-footsie thinking. Now Prez. Obama has moved on to only 70-year-old ideas by starting up Mr. Keynes’ public money shovel. It worked before—when the shovel was big enough— so I expect it will work again.

The big question for me is where do you shovel all the money—in the same old carbon-cooking, late-age capitalism pork-pots or do you aim the shovel in new green directions.

We need to make jobs and make stuff, but let’s make something that doesn’t use up many resources, doesn’t burn much coal or oil, and helps people out.

Back in the 80’s, in an earlier mess, a bunch of people thought about making new stuff. It’s a good example. Boeing laid off engineers when too many jets just sat around doing nothing (sort of like those foreclosed-on houses, these days). Ever wonder why your baby carriage looks like a 747 landing gear getting ready for touchdown? Those hot shot, laid off engineers looked at the baby buggies like I pushed my son around in, buggies that felt like a boat on a truck chassis, buggies that took the whole trunk to pack them up and weighed more than my wife. Those smart-guy engineers changed everything with new light-weight designs that twisted into a little pile of tubes and cloth and fit anywhere. That’s the way to do it.

A month or so ago, my friend Sue started writing all sorts of politicians about the chance to make buses and passenger trains again in the US. That sounds like a good green direction for the money shovel to point. Where I live, we buy buses from the Dutch and train cars from the French. And have to pay in Euros that cost a bunch. We could change that. American cars look like buses anyway so why not do stretch Hummers and Escalades and give them away to any town that promises to add them to their bus fleet. That’s a lot better than buying whacko loans from defunct banks.

But we need something big. Bigger than buses. To keep millions of people in work. I’m thinking of the great business success of our time: Acrylic Nails. There are way more nail shops than factories in the US—more nail shops than just about anything except espresso stops and porta-potties (more about them later). Nails are green—not a big oil burner, a little oil makes a bunch of nails. And you don’t just do it once. They break, they chip, and sometimes you just want new pictures and glitter to jazz them up. But best of all, nail customers are happy as puppies with their fancy personalized weapons.

OK, there is a problem that keeps the nail industry in check. Most men have pretty short ones. We could come out with macho-themed nail pix, like skulls and daggers and other nasty stuff, or we could work on completely different “looking-good” products, that, like nails, take a while to apply and wear off in a week or two, but are for men too.
If we can get more nail action and some new products going, then ten million hard working people will open shops and we will have an entrepreneur burst that will light up our money supply like hotcakes.

Here’s my idea. I have been watching those crazy fans who paint their faces for games. Why not wear face paint all the time. It’s worth a try. Everyone with face paint for their favorite team, getting it redone once a week in private fan shops on every main street and mall in America.

Or what about those fancy beard trims. Barbers used to do it but now beards are do-it-yourself, like fixing toilets and sinks. Can’t we put barbers back on the map? If Bush can tell us to go shopping, then Obama can tell us to paint our faces, do our nails and get a trim.

Everyone can sneak out for an hour or so of nails, trim and facepaint without any trouble That’s 200 million folks paying 20 bucks each. That’s billions a week. Hundreds of billions a year. About the same as they are giving banks. Instead, they should mail out coupons for all the new shops that will open. Coupons for one treatment a week for the next year or so for every red-blooded, looking great (with their facepaint and trim and nails) American over 5 years old. (Let’s not forget the kids.)

That’s lot’s of jobs, lots of small business and not much oil and waste. Wow!

P.S. Oops, I forgot about the porta-potties and espresso shops. I’ll leave that for you to add on to barber shops and nail emporiums or maybe buses. Send you ideas in right away.