I’m surprised it took this long, but DISH Networks is closing down the rest of the Blockbuster stores.

Apparently the average store was 5000 square feet, which means at its peak Blockbuster accounted for 45 million square feet of retail space! According to this article there is 14.2 billion square feet of retail space or 46.6 square feet per capita. According to the same article there were 1.1 million retail establishments in the US, or 1 establishment per every 313 people. Walmart generated revenues of $444 billion in 2012, $310 billion of that in the US. In fact the top 10 retail establishments alone generated $2.2 trillion of revenue in the US alone!

According to this article, we spent $200 billion online in 2011 and that is expected to rise to $327 billion in the next couple of years, although my guess is that is low. In 2012, Amazon alone generated $61 billion in revenue, all online of course.

I have shopping down the street. In fact if you live in the US almost everyone has shopping down the street. The former Borders store is still completely empty and across the street the remnants of the Blockbuster sign are still visible even though it closed years ago. Across town the Party Warehouse store sits empty and over by the mall the former Circuit City store has never really found a permanent new resident.

Meanwhile many more are on the brink. Can Best Buy survive and its 56 million square feet of retail space? How about Sears and J.C. Penney?

Why do I bring all this up?

Think of all the retail space Blockbuster controlled at its peak. 9000 stores. 45 million square feet. Think of all the employees that worked there. All those stores, all those employees without jobs, gone. Done in by Netflix, primarily, who employs next to no one.

If Walmart gets destroyed by Amazon then where do people work? Does Amazon hire them all as local delivery people?

So here’s the theme running through my head: as more businesses go online, as Amazon does to Walmart and Best Buy what Walmart and Best Buy did to mom and pop shops everywhere, what moves into these retail outlets? And where does everyone work? And if people aren’t being paid, then how do they buy goods and services, which keep other retail stores alive? And if people aren’t making money then who pays taxes that pays for the military, social security, Medicare, schools and all the other things a lot of people have come to expect from our society?

I’m not saying it’s going to play out this way. Something has always come along and smart people have shifted, from farms to factories to retailers.

But it doesn’t mean we can keep assuming the same rules apply, either.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was at a conference and waiting to meet Steve Blank when he abruptly left and I ended up meeting Tim Gieseler instead. I wrote about this in a post called Accidental Meetings. Tim ran his business, Orion Telescopes, for over 30 years. In January I will start year 17 for Infinity Softworks.

One of the things we talked about was the challenges of running a company long-term. As he pointed out, thinking in terms of a decade or two instead of a year or two changes one’s perspective on the business, particularly when dealing with business fluctuations.

When thinking short-term, there isn’t a year or two to let the business grow naturally, to take its winding and weaving course, to let the business be the living, breathing thing that it is. When thinking short-term the business managers are forcing it in a certain direction, needing it to grow in the manager’s timeframe.

We’ve been experiencing a dip in the business the last few years. In fact for the first time professionally we have been doing contract work to pay the bills. If I was to zoom in on this two-year period, the graph may look a little something like this:

Pretty flat overall with a lot of ups-and-downs month-to-month.

If I was working on a short-term business, one I hoped to sell in three, four, five years, then this period would be fatal. It would be a lot of treading water, which I couldn’t afford to do.

But I don’t see business this way. I see it as something that needs to grow and change in its own time. Hopefully, when I zoom out on the life of Infinity Softworks, this period will seem like an inconsequential dip somewhere in the middle:

As Tim said, there is a natural cycle to these things. Just keep pushing through it if you believe in what you are doing.

There has never been a time in US history where the wealthy have so much and the rest of us have so little. And by wealthy I’m not talking about those making a few hundred grand a year. I’m talking millions a year, the top 0.1%, the top 0.01%.

What’s more disturbing is that we can’t begin to have a conversation about how to deal with this problem — whether it even is a problem — until we all actually understand the distribution itself. And the reality is most of us only think we understand it.

This amazing video uses infographics to help explain the disparity. I hope you will take six minutes and watch it.