Creative Destruction Defined

Was it dead? A former Home Depot building, behemoth tribute to big-box retail’s hey day, sat empty on Convoy street. The real estate boom ended. Invested couples became more interested in reducing credit card balances and the spare bathroom retiling project got canceled. Plywood replaced front doors. Months touched aging on the paint and gave free reign to the weeds between cracks. The abandonment taunted the adjacent Target store, and probably inhibited their traffic because the center looked vacated while driving by.

Suddenly a fence surrounded the shell. Lifters, cargo containers with glistening copper pipes, and stacks of lumber became the area’s features. Workers with utility belts and dusty pants swarmed the complex. The brash noises of pulverizing and hammering filled the air with shock and energy. A sign appeared explaining the metamorphosis: COMING SOON: COSTCO. Indeed, it was too soon to declare this building a carcass; a change of deeds and fascia resurrected it from slumber and slumming.

In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter defined The Process of Creative Destruction:

We are dealing with an evolutionary process… Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is, but never can be, stationary… The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new market, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.