What’s Old is New Again

In my 10 May post What Can We Do With All This Thinking? you might remember Nancy and Carol, who have consolidated their business into a single wool shop in an English market town. Like many other business owners, they have been thinking about how to reopen safely. They are not in a high-margin sector, so adaptations need to be low cost. In their case, putting up a clear plastic barrier between the service counter and customers will not be enough.

Their small shop makes it difficult to maintain two meters of separation if more than two or three customers at a time enter. It’s going to be very hard to set up in a way that lets customers see all their inventory without perhaps getting too close to each other. But that isn’t the most awkward issue.

Customers in wool shops love to squidge the yarn. They knit or crochet, and whatever they make is usually meant to be worn rather than merely looked at. It’s highly tactile. But allowing everyone to squidge the yarn for a sense of how it feels is not safe in this pandemic.

Then we realized such shops operated during other epidemics within living memory. It isn’t necessary to reach all the way back to Spanish Flu more than century ago.

Our parents or grandparents remember polio as a scourge. For a long time, the way it spread wasn’t fully understood. At first didn’t even have a single name. It was summer flu, or the grippe, or Iceland disease, whatever name stuck in a particular region. It took years for scientists to realize all of those were the same disease. Until science figured out how it spread, people only understood that it tended to sweep through populated places every summer. It was terrifying.

More of us remember the emergence of AIDS. In Asia, even more remember SARS, the precursor to today’s pandemic. Influenza is certainly not the only disease that causes pandemics.

In discussion about ways to rejigger the shop, we found ourselves reaching back to the way small shops used to operate. You didn’t expect to browse all the merchandise. You expected a narrower range of options. You stepped up to the counter, told a sales clerk what you wanted to buy, and got what the clerk brought from the back. At the butcher’s, you didn’t choose the exact piece of meat that looked best. You asked for two pork chops and you got the ones the butcher wrapped up for you.

Nancy and Carol will have to do that with their stock. Yarn, knitting needles, accessories, books, pretty much everything will need to be sold that way. But they don’t have to figure it all out from scratch. What’s old is new again. Thinking back to the way shops used to operate will give them an array of possibilities.

We talked about other old methods that won’t suit them, but might suit some other business. Those ideas were fun to share with each other even though they won’t be used in the wool shop.

For example, in some shops, money used to not be handled by the sales clerk. The customer’s payment and the invoice were put into a sealed container, which the clerk inserted into a pneumatic tube. A blast of compressed air shot the container through the tube, usually upstairs, to someone who put the change in the tube with the invoice and (before computers came along) subtracted the sold items from inventory tracking. Drive-through banking in the USA still uses pneumatic tubes to allow one teller to service multiple lanes of customers.

To make a large inventory of small items accessible to customers in a very small space, we discussed a vertical floor-to-ceiling conveyor belt of trays in an old-fashioned hardware store. The trays were divided into small sections, each of which held stock of a different type or size of screws, bolt and nails. The customer could press a button to advance the conveyor, stopping when the hardware they wanted was at a convenient height. The trays swiveled as they went over the top or under the bottom so they were always level. An amazingly large, well organized variety of small hardware took up a tiny amount of floor space. Wool doesn’t weigh as much as hardware so it wouldn’t need an electric motor in the wool shop, but Nancy and Carol have other ideas for a way to let customers squidge yarn samples without touching actual stock.

News coverage about this pandemic repeatedly uses the word unprecedented. It is and it isn’t, all at once. As far as anyone knows, humanity has never faced a disease like COVID-19 before. In some countries we have taken extraordinary steps to limit its spread or even, in rare places like New Zealand, starve it out. But humanity repeatedly faces epidemics, sometimes pandemics. Sometimes the diseases are horrible and frightening.

We don’t have to look a century back to see other episodes where people needed to radically modify their behavior to fend off a rampaging disease. In deciding how to step into a future of fending off COVID-19 while we have no effective vaccine or treatment for it, remember that you may not need to invent all your coping mechanisms. You may be able to borrow some from the past. Your parents or grandparents may already know some of the answers you need.