What a diff’rence a crisis made..

I hope you recognized the adaptation in the title, after Dinah Washington’s lovely song. Let me tell you a little story about 3 people. There’s Jonas, an experienced merchandise trader who owns a warehouse at the quay, there’s Andrew, a young and promising artist who is at the forefront of the new “urban art” movement, and then there’s Misha, Andrew’s brother, who is a libertarian soul, adept of an “alternative” life style, and in love with social movements. Currently, he is doing his best to run a small downtown grocery for a living, but now here comes the Big Bad Crisis.
Andrew struggled for a long time, trying to find a decent place to exhibit his latest creations. The posh downtown galleries were asking for crazy amounts (in line with the current real estate rental rates) and the adequate space, the kind of surface that would really put Andrew’s work in the right perspective, wasn’t even being offered.
In the meantime, on Jonas’ side of the story; after enjoying quite a long streak of successful business he experienced a sudden drop in demand, with most of its long-standing customers cancelling orders, with imported merchandise becoming prohibitively expensive due to a strengthening of the local currency. After a couple of months in the serious red, he was pretty desperate; especially considering that he needed to catch-up with his mortgage along with the tuition for his four children. One day, while Andrew was wandering the quay, precisely in search of a deserted warehouse that might be converted with little investment into exhibition space, he was immediately struck by the 18th century-style brick warehouse that Jonas used to own, but was no longer much use to him considering the current circumstances. The rest is details. Andrew rented the place, and after a light reconversion he displayed his work;the place becoming a smashing hit among the critics and art consumers alike. Jonas in fact, after hearing about the languishing grocery business of Misha, took over the place and transformed it into a really successful business, based on his previous knowledge of perfectly synchronized commerce, while Misha found a position with an NGO and immediately left for Africa, where he would become the most successful project manager the philanthropy industry has ever seen (maybe his brief experience as a lousy grocer helped out here, who knows). The morale of the story thus being: A crisis implies a lot of disruption in the economy and in the people’s lives, but it is the only mechanism which can shake and unwind sub-optimal processes, reshuffle and free resources and bring new skills onto the market, at the same time as it sends rotten business practices to the garbage bin of history.