Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I`ve been catching up on economics, going back to read about the Zero-Sum Solution and other ideas of the 80s. In the course of reading about American productivity and how it`s contracting the US economy, I got to thinking about the small business sector.

Personally, I think the international corporation and large enterprise model is going through some revisions, and may not work the way it always has in the past. I also agree that the middle class is getting smaller and smaller, leading to either low income or high income salaries and lifestyles.

In between, answering the question of where we`ll get back to producing, we have entrepreneurs and e-commerce. These are growing strongly, and that got me thinking back to the Great Depression. At that time, with America emerging as almost the only very large economy, a lot of things were "inside" the boundaries of the country.

In other words, a lot of people had no money, but a lot of others had plenty of money. It`s always true that there`s a lot of money around, despite economic failures, bankruptcies, and collapses. Nowadays, I believe that money will show up in the world economy, not being limited to a national boundary.

If all this happens, then it would clearly be to our advantage to sell more to an international market. We have a single product, but with the Web and computerized currency conversions, it wouldn`t be that difficult. PayPal already handles a lot of this, almost transparently.

I also was remembering about some sort of online currency system using gold. I can`t remember the name or the details, but it got me to thinking about our price structure. Let`s say we sell 1 flag for $8 US, but that the dollar begins to weaken and economy continues downward.

How many of you think it would be a good idea to tie our product price to the price of gold? So right now, 1 flag = 1% gold ounce.

We wouldn`t list that on our sites and pricing sheets, but we would use the formula internally, on our own. If the US economy gets a lot worse, we would change our pricing accordingly. But if we started selling internationally, couldn`t we set up a calculation in a shopping cart to display the price relative to a manually entered ounce of gold?

Wouldn`t that also keep the price at an objective level across other currencies? If the German economy, for example, was holding steady, then their currency would remain the same in relation to an ounce of gold....wouldn`t it?