Member-only story
GRACE TAKES NOTES
I’m Just Here For The Popcorn
No butter, please
The trouble with writing for a company that doesn’t know what it wants to be is twofold. First, we make up our own story about who they are, and second, we tell others as if we know the truth.
Then, we operate as if our opinions are facts. That’s the dangerous part.
My roommates and I started a business selling custom hand-stamped military-type tags in college. We hammered names and quotes into little metal blanks using an old-fashioned letterpress font, and they sold like hotcakes.
We vended at a craft fair near our campus one sunny Saturday in May. It was a great success, but the ‘real artists’ were not amused. Potters and painters sat seething in quiet booths with very few customers.
Their work was stellar, but the prices were high. Perhaps they misjudged the target audience or did not like the egalitarian way the fair was run. Truthfully, patrons only have a certain amount of money to spend on ‘art’. The pie was the same size, but everyone only got a sliver now.
Medium, if you haven’t surmised, is now that online craft fair. The barrier to entry is $5.00 and a phone or a library computer. Now, you, too, can be a writer. That’s…