Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from Frozen & Dairy Buyer magazine.
I've concluded that the sky is not falling after all. This startling epiphany came after I sat through a series of presentations at three separate conferences. At each, speakers held forth, convincingly, on the dreadful things that are poised to hit the fan and soon. I heard how business is tougher than ever, and that 53 percent of us will be lucky to be Walmart greeters in five years.
Confession time: I've probably been in the "glass is half-empty" camp for way too many years. And I've always taken these dire predictions as gospel. But then one sleepless night, pondering how the long-ago death of print media would surely be the ruin of me within a fortnight, I suddenly thought, "Bullcrap!"
As a mildly related aside here, you may have heard of "Bullcrap Bingo," only under another, coarser, brand name. Bullcrap Bingo calls for audience members to keep a little card in their laps during speeches at conventions. Terms such as "at the end of the day," "paradigm shift," and "negative earnings" are checked off at the time they're heard, until someone in the audience crosses off a straight row of them. He or she is then supposed to jump up and shout "Bullcrap!", thus embarrassing the speaker and seriously damaging the shouter's career trajectory. (All stories of people actually getting up and doing that are urban legends, or I suppose I should say convention legends.)
Anyway, it dawned on me that I've been hearing these same death rattles from lecterns for several decades now, and while they make good copy for the columns of newspapers and such, not a whole helluva lot has really changed. In cleaning out some basement cabinets last week, I found stories I'd written way back in the last century. Not much had changed except for the names and the dates.
So I've decided that the glass is half full, by gum, and
between you and me, I just took a swig of it. Would you believe it's an excellent
pilsner? Really. Try some. I'll wait right here.
The point of all this is that if you expect disaster, that's probably what you'll get. And if you expect good things, you'll probably attract them. Zen folk have been telling me that for years, and I'm finally starting to believe them.
From this day forward, I'm moving ahead as if print media will never die, frozen and dairy foods will thrive forever, and prognosticators of doom will be sufficiently wrong as to be nearly irrelevant. I wish you patience and fortitude, gentle reader. You gotta believe.