Small-Business Blues

Hello blipfoto, it's been a while. As I'm sure all of us have experienced, side-projects are difficult to keep on track - excuses are too easily made, good or bad - and I'm clearly no exception. The difficulty of this format is that after you miss a couple of days it's even easier to say 'sod it' and give up, as you can't go back in time to take the photos you didn't shoot. What's worse is that I did actually take some nice photos but just didn't get around to doing anything with them. Perhaps I'll fill in the blanks at some point when I'm feeling suitably inspired.

Anyway, here is the sign for a dead restaurant not too far from where I work. In South Korea there is a very high rate of entrepreneurship amongst small-business owners. Such willingness to take risks is a prime example of the reasons as to why the South's economy became so strong in such a short period of time (There are other, some darker reasons for this too, but that's for another post). The problem of course is that when an economy starts to slow and potentially contract, many of these small businesses find themselves competing for a smaller slice of the pie and so those less sharp-elbowed wind up going hungry. Life in the shiny Free Trade Zone of New Songdo is no different, and while new restaurants and bars are appearing all the time they quite often are being built on the ashes of the old. I have seen quite a few changes in the 9 months or so since I've been here, and this change heralds caution that the population still has to grow by some way before there is enough to keep everyone's shutters from rolling down permanently.

I thought this was fitting as I've been giving a lot of thought to my plans for next year once again, and it helps to remind me of that risk I may take myself. I'm aware that a high percentage of first time business ventures fail, but certain precautions can be taken and without risks where would we all be in life? I certainly wouldn't be here, though perhaps my readership would be higher due to the increased volume of people sitting bored at home. Food for thought.