“Gentleman, you have come sixty days too late. The depression is over.”
Sound familiar? This was actually Herbert Hoover, responding to a delegation requesting a public works program to help speed the recovery in June of 1930.
Like many distributors back then, distributors today have almost taken growth for granted. When recessions slow and financial crises erupt, they generally have been regarded as the exception, temporary departures from an otherwise steady upward heavy-duty market progression — bigger truck fleet, increasing average age, blah, blah.
However, it should be increasingly clear that the current downturn is fundamentally different from recessions of 2007, 2001, 1991, 1980 or 1973. Between January 2008 and December 2009, distribution lost 467,000 jobs. Who knows how many from the heavy-duty sector? This is not merely another bump in the business cycle, but a restructuring of the economic order.
For some organizations, near-term survival has become the only agenda item. Others wonder how to position themselves once the “flat spots” have passed and things return to normal.
The question is, “What will normal look like?” What we will find on the other side will be foreign. The new normal will be shaped by a confluence of powerful forces — some arising directly from the recent economic dip and some that were at work long before it began.
