It’s All in the Selling and Buying
Aren’t we living in an extremely commercialized world within which the human dependence on commerce is absolutely overwhelming? Undoubtedly, our reliance on commerce has always been paramount, since time immemorial. Yet nowadays every step of the way on the road to a better life is engulfed by it. In simpler words, this trickles down to the efforts of a person creating an object that can be sold and, having sold it, providing for the creator’s survival. This is the ABC of the survival process.
Why such a wordy introduction to this most trivial segment of our life which is well known to all? Because I would like to put it very simply that Georgia’s often criticized economy and its monetary token the Lari will never get stable and reliable unless we manufacture things that are briskly sellable – by which I mean, sellable both here and beyond our borders. Sellable could be the objects of many different categories, items of everyday usage: food, drinks, art, inventions, ideas, services, and what not. What are we good at? What could the fastest money-maker in Georgia be that a man’s hand can create and sell?
I hear all the time that our economic plans contain the production of goods with that endearing label ‘Made in Georgia.’ In reality, I am always buying things that are ‘Made in China, Turkey and India,’ or any other possible land that produces something that the world is interested in.
Newspapers are packed full of information that I may never need to have in order to be better equipped for survival, but I would love to someday open the paper and see a list of products in it that are made in Georgia and sell successfully around the world, bringing in the foreign currency that could prop up the faltering Lari and the economy attached to it. I wonder how many articles would be on that list. Is there any chance to grow the list so much that the country’s budget and our nearly empty pockets feel the power of commerce in this country?
At present that list of goods is limited in Georgia, and there is little hope of making it longer. How about listing the services, then? Is it just as hard to let it grow? What would you say about the artifacts we have always been famous for? Georgian singing and dancing could also be foreign currency magnets, couldn’t they? I have almost forgotten the inventions and industrial ideas that could easily be commercialized if we knew how to handle their introduction to the interested world. Intellect is appreciated everywhere, and who knows how promising the commercial power of our national intelligence is!?
What I am talking about might seem a little bit far-fetched to some of us but I don’t think either my idea or attitude leave any room for doubt, because it is the classic understanding of economy and its financial viability that success lies in the art of selling and buying.
We might be lacking flexibility in the art of trade, but I know for sure that we have sharp enough wits and skilled enough hands to embark on a serious exchange of a variety of products with the rest of the world. The only thing we need to take care of is enhancing the quality and content of the future sellable products in the name of Georgia. And also more confidence in the possibility of triggering the world’s interest towards the magic liable ‘Made in Georgia’ proudly shining on every manufactured good that travels the world in expectation of popularity.
In a word – if you sell it, you do well, and to sell it, it needs to be attractive, very attractive to compete with the rest of humanity.
Nugzar B. Ruhadze