Pittsburgh’s retail and restaurant pulse point for a speculative decade of swinging transitions

During the last seven years there has been a schismatic shift to online consumption of goods, entertainment, new tech services in all sectors – including conversion of real money to digital currency, and tracked-socializing behaviors. I’d be hard pressed to meet someone who was not affected as a consumer by the global pandemic in a very personal and technical way between 2020 – 2023.

I was. You were. They and us all.

Today, we are all looking at another global threat that is equally punitive with less guidance for businesses and their customers. There seems to be a retaliatory antithesis of the ‘health and safety’ aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States of America’s new body of government that readers will find evidence of in legacy media, local media, and social media in varying takes and staggering updates.

Left Field Thoughts

If I could paint an abstract concept of what I see happening right now in a freely-associated run-on sentence proof-read for iambic didacticism: it would depict the polar qualities of learning in a mimicking twin performce for those whose ears and mouths have been closing to a certain type of disharmony that appears to show up in our standardized turn-of-anew-century markers that largely look like a spring and yet seem like that baby’s blonde head poking out might not be its true colors. Somewhere there’s DuChamp’s Fountain and Given: 1. The Waterfall. 2. The Illuminating Gas prominently floating around Warhol’s Silver Clouds and Soup Cans in the dual reel of our public’s late modernity imagery. – S Lauren Stauffer

I speculate many small business owners and locally-owned corporations are not looking at the silver lining of the saved expenses we previously were mandated to follow during the last ‘unprecedented’ time. Such needs for purchasing masks, gloves, sanitizer, extra cleaning services, plexi glass screens, extra technology equipment to afford doing remote work from home, outdoor seating investments, investments in self-checkout equipment, new or extra software-as-a-service expenses from new and existing business groups to expand communications with customers, without even mentioning the unbillable time it took owners, managers, leaders, and consumers to make all these extra decisions and purchases day in and day out.

And because many of us would, while many of us didn’t think we should, adopt ways of interacting in high-volume public areas of commerce and services during the four years each country addressed the global virus – it showed who could be counted on to extend their resources in these efforts willingly and not.

As I write this today on April 11, 2025 I look back at how I very much hoped with many others that 2024 was the clean-break to getting-back-to-business in ways one could describe as financial convalescence. Yet I’ve been exposed to talking heads, social situations in-person and online, and other reading materials that suggest history-on-repeat that includes Civil War sentiments. A quick and unprompted Google Search of today’s date leads to AI’s predictive and suggested knowledge that 164 years ago is exactly where the United States was walking into.

Politically misaligned priorities leading to conflict isn’t new to the US or any country, neither locality nor family, and can be seen in Yelp or Google business reviews, noteworthy stories written by journalists or novelists, or any casual run-up in social circles about our human need for comparable-differentiation to understand our shared reality. Consequences for lack of truth while representing the public good is also not new to any timeline, algorithm or heuristic.

If we parallel the 1920’s radio broadcasting influence the same way social media’s new found grip edged into the game of politics we’re seeing in real-time the transitions of communities being decentralized from local-personal connections to newly formed wells of consumer communications.

On November 2, 1920, Pittsburgh’s station KDKA made the nation’s first commercial broadcast. They chose that date because it was election day, and the power of radio was proven when people could hear the results of the Harding-Cox presidential race before they read about it in the newspaper. – PBS

Speaking of radio and newspapers, I spent the last decade working at a local community-specific newspaper. I was the one-person Advertising Department on a two-person news team. I brought all of my tools from previous iterations of my roles in professional endeavors. I was able to engage with a wide auidence from small business, political candidates, local leadership, neighbors, large corporations, local non-profits, event organizers, and beyond.

I also participated in a multi-industry fumbling of how permanence in consumable ‘ownership’ is converted into rentable non-real and non-personal property. The credibility of traditional paper products developed into a digitized version of amateur photography-hour by software companies, the newspaper producers and publishers, along-side our elected officials and unelected board of shareholders with their hired leadership companions.

“Newspapers” were deemed essential during the pandemic and I was fortunate enough to have had some foresight at that particular industry’s landscape to begin networking with other local print outlets that were neighborhood focused to see where we could drum up business or grant funding in a ‘wholesale’ way while coordinating larger civic stories that helped fill the pages when life majorly went to being online noise.

Right Field Thoughts

Readers can venture here for information about the Pittsburgh Community Newspaper Network and delve into my search for reputable reports to substantiate my criticism for ‘green washing’ marketing in regards to sustainability, intrinsic value of owning paper productions of our shared public and private visual/literature culture, how consumerism of digital information is being shaped (through advertising), and concern for national, state, and local legislation that failed their oath of due diligence in terms of actually amending our laws and respective constitutions regarding the public service of news delivery to constituents before throwing proverbial babies out with the bathwater, right on to MiMaw and PawPaw. – S Lauren Stauffer

Within those newspaper years, I was able to attend two media conventions in Harrisburg where they presented as night and day in context and content. It was increasingly clear that there is a cohort of leaders who are in a pickle of an aging-out work-force with manufacturing capabilities never to be passed on while onboarding larger swaths of younger workers who have primarily been conditioned on ‘computers’ as their primary working tool with big beliefs in ‘management productivity’ over the actual product produced.

Retail, restaurants, and the array of public-house types are going to re-live another few years of who’s been able to pull through while watching those who couldn’t and those who would like to fill in where vacancies take up. These businesses will be the forefront of the economic warfare in terms of delivering food, clothing, and accessories-of-shelters to both their brick-and-mortar shelves or online inventory while competing with the current tech-barons and monopolies who are simalteounesly investing in rocket-space-tourism. I also believe ‘return to normal’ will not come back into vogue during this time of marketing newly unprecedented times.

The word retail comes from the Old French verb retaillier, meaning “to shape by cutting” (c. 1365). It was first recorded as a noun in 1433 with the meaning of “a sale in small quantities” from the Middle French verb retailler meaning “a piece cut off, shred, scrap, paring”.^[1] At present, the meaning of the word retail (in English, French, Dutch, German and Spanish) refers to the sale of small quantities of items to consumers (as opposed to wholesale). – Wikipedia

I often reference to the like-with-like organizing concept with other community newspapers might come in handy to owners of public facing retailers and restaurants in regards to sourcing, delivery, storage, and marketing of goods and services. Indeed, competition is part of the game, yet consumers love the side-by-side statistics in sports, blogs love writing up their comparisons of products and services, and it would probably do well for businesses to have an industry ‘safety raft’ to get through some choppy waters.

One industry I see doing this in the area is the brewery industry, with an association, and other side-business support in marketing and event organizing that particular crowd. I get a closer look because my long-time boyfriend is an owner at one. Sure, there’s competition – there will always be businesses that love taking others original ideas for their own and fork into the pie-per-say. There are also those who share brewing materials and tools when UPS or FedEx can’t be bothered to deliver the items in their truck on time or when a distributor of grains or hops has a supply issue that delays.

Marketing efforts from within like the Pittsburgh Brewers Guild’s Brewery Guide book to subsidiary event planners for large events like Pittsburgh Beerfest or Barrel and Flow are valuable to the industry and consumers alike. When I first started PGHretail.com, and was looking at the infrastructure to support more traditional Main Street retail stores at the crest of online retailing in 2011, I had hoped to start a Retailers Association at the time. There’s still space and opportunity for it, I saw it in the print work I was doing, yet I’m on a sabbatical from creative marketing and design at the moment.

I was telling my hair dresser this time last year the story about my current apathy for creative software because the digital ‘tools’ I spent significant financial, time, and energy resources on are a) no longer ‘desktop’ applications I can own outright, b) the new cloud software I have to license (renting my professional tools now) is making quarterly ‘updates’, ‘upgrades’, and other ‘share-holder value’ decisions that affect my time-at-task I bill for, and c) undoubtedly every single person who used these softwares pre-cloud age and beyond agreed to allow the software to take data from our work while turning around asking us to pay more for changes to our work-flow we didn’t neccessarily ask for and are often pre-emptive pushes to remove a formerly ‘owned’ control in our processes because they’ve repacked them into an AI scripted program.

If a digital artist were licensed by a state board similar to cosmotology and cutting hair was similar to cutting pixels to a desired affect, I explained to her, it would also be similar to having requirements that instituted that her scissors be repurchased every quarter and they would be a mildly-different design, material, and handle. I asked her if she thought her customers would appreciate the hold up if she didn’t find the latest committee-designed scissors comfortable to perform her professional skills and if she felt her personal magic of knowing ones tools like a well-worn glove she freely chose to fit her was amenable to her livlihood.

The parable for retailers who need to communicate digitally, and in the realm of physical media, need to be aware that there’s an ongoing shift in the creative spheres of marketing, web, and ‘pre-cut’ design that are following the tails of banking and other financial institutions in the way they interface with small businesses. Sure, there are free versions to quickly mock up social media ad designs or ‘upgrade’ for a buck or two to premium designs. The problem is saturation of ‘AI’ content where actual talent has been locked out of the very pool they, the talent, masterfully tiled and filled with their natural intellegiance.

At the same time, I’ve watched physical print media and generations migrate to these popular digital spaces that are highly-addictive and curated content over organic info, ‘copy pasta’ marketing trends, literal copyright infringing by overseas companies to individuals, and an ever changing platform of software designs that cost business owners doing-it-all time away from task rather than online ‘publishing’ they had already mastered.

With it is the current tariff situation now asking the same essential businesses and consumers to pay for an intentional price-jacking with widely varying degrees in belief that manufacturing of goods and raw materials is coming back to the states. This was an observation by my millennial cohorts in Philadelphia during the 2008 recession when jobs were scarce because of the housing crash. During those years, I was working for an independent furniture designer scrapping industrial sewing machines into welded in-house tables and chandeliers built in our former-movie-theater warehouse for the likes of Anthropology and Ralph Lauren Europe while supplementing the luxury resort and pre-holiday shopping seasons with imported vintage-reproduction from India and China.

Do people really want to work in factories? I am unable to see how working in Amazon warehouses isn’t an extention of that already. Even if US or foreign investors and businesses wanted to reinvent the wheel we sold off 40 + years ago, it would take a decade minimum at best to gear those things up to build a sustaining model of national or regional centralized production to localized delivery and retail channels.

Here in lies the opportunity to restructure delivery of goods and communication to a wide variety of audiences within the limited sources we’re about to encounter over the next four years. It is going to be difficult to gauge over-all consumer spending until there is more insight or resolute action on our shared economic future.

I predict by 2036 we’ll have seen a shift away from the social media we know into rentable digital communities (think library books and scholastic mail subscription lists) with actual consumer protections, while print media is the next round of consumer-interest preservation like Kodak film and vinyl records, and factory work is going to be looked upon with a coal miner’s head lamp.

Thanks for reading my TEDxSoundOff.

Center Field Thoughts

Follow me @burgheoisie for ‘original’ AI art that envisions the many concepts going on in my mind as my hand recovers from twenty years of debilitating over-use on a mouse. AI work is not copyrightable, and yet used what should be copyrighted works online to generate. While I choose to use free versions and styles, I really ask the robots to think about my vague yet specific prompts. You can tell when I’ve gone too far on their byte processors – they spit out an interframe space, leaving me with the beginning and an end of an image like it’s running an 1895 celluloid film projector of everyone’s and no one’s work of art. – S Lauren Stauffer