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Every fall, my wife and I trek west from Chicago to the Amana Colonies in eastern Iowa, about a three- or four-hour jaunt from our home. This year was our seventeenth year. We started in 1992.
We rendezvous in the Amana Colonies with a couple from Kansas City for a long October weekend. I went to graduate school with the husband, and my wife worked at a Dude Ranch in Colorado with the wife. The couple introduced us about 18 years ago in Denver. Through good times and bad, cancer and job loss and six kids (total), we’ve never missed a fall in eastern Iowa.
The Amana Colonies are a series of villages, originally established in the mid-1800s by German immigrants who had come to the States in the mid 1840s to avoid religious persecution. The Amana Colonies formed one of America’s longest-lived and largest religious communal societies. The community supported itself through farming and the production of wool and calico. The community also made clocks, brewed beer, and made well-crafted products. (The folks at the Amana Colonies are not like the Amish or the Hutterites, who eschew modern comforts.) You’ve probably heard of “Amana Radar Ranges” or other kitchen products; there’s a manufacturing plant in one of the Amana villages, though it is now owned by a conglomerate.
Today, the Amana Colonies is mostly for shopping and eating. My wife and the wife of my friend shop at village shops while he and I play golf, watch college football on TV at the bed-and-breakfast, or attend an Iowa Hawkeye football game in nearby Iowa City. It’s a weekend for slugs.
Over the 17 years, we’ve seen the Amana Colonies morph from a destination place with boutique shops, each with unique inventory, to what it is today: a series of generic shops all owned by the Amana Colonies corporation. That is, when we first started visiting the Colonies in the early to mid-nineties, the shops in the villages were independently owned. My wife said recently, “Each shop was unique. You never knew what you’d find; shopping was a lot of fun.”
But that all changed.
In recent years, as best I can tell, the Amana corporation may have forced out the independent shop owners by not renewing their leases. So, today you still have, for example, many of the kinds of shops that you had in the 1990s, but they all pretty much sell the same thing – what the buyer at the corporation decides is good for all the stores. The creativity is gone. The individuality is gone. The corporation came and made everything bland.
It’s hard to know if the drop in tourist visits to the Amana Colonies preceded the move to standardize the shops or is a consequence of shopping that has become generic.
But the point is still true: Corporation thinking tends to value standardization and efficiency. No doubt, there’s a place for that. But someone needs to fight for creativity, for being unique, for taking risks. That is, if your organization wants to grow.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Dave
This is so true and a challenge for any creative types working in an environment where creativity is not allowed to flourish. In Seth Godin’s blog he says that many of us “show up sober, listen to the boss and lift heavy objects”. Real growth and career fulfillment lies, I think, in taking the risk, being creative and standing out against the backdrop of the Amana Colonies Corporation.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
As the title of your blog entry suggests, I think “fighting for what is unique” is the problem we are facing and not necessarily the big corporation. Creativity requires time, effort, and risk. We need to take the time, effort, and risk to determine what sells and what does not. We next need to figure out how to promote ourselves as unique which takes additional time, effort, and risk. Do I want to “waste” my time on all this or do I do I want to slide into the tried and true method of opening a business and make a couple of pennies?
You made me smile thinking of your annual trip to Amana Colonies… it must be fall again.
I think about all the places I have visited. The shopping districts are always filled with T-shirt shops, cheap chatch-kes tied to the area’s theme, and the same food choices. They all sell the same things. They all are close to the same prices. And they are ALL filled with tourists! Why try something new?
Two exceptions quickly came to mind as I read your entry. I am sure there are others. Poopsies and The Toy Box in Galena, IL are must stop places when you visit downtown Galena. Both places offer hard-to-find and unique gifts. People can spend hours in these places, touching the merchandise, trying them out, and showing their companions their discoveries. This is shopping at its best: the discovery.
Creating the environment of discovery takes effort and I do not think many (corporations or small business people) want to dedicate the time, effort, and risk to give their customers this experience.