How Quickly We Grow Accustomed

Television as we know it is just over 50 years young. When I was a child in the early 50's, we had a black & white TV (there were no color TV's until the 60's) and there were just a couple of channels and we lived at that time in Southern California. I guess my generation is the first to grow up on TV. Now there are hundreds of channels, you can't even find a black and white TV, but there HD-TV's everywhere. But, this is a long growth period.

The Internet. Although 1991 is kind of a start year in some respects, the Internet as we know it really began about 1994. There were no such thing as web pages, and now there are hundreds of millions of them. What a phenomenal growth period the last 15 years has been in this field. There appears to be no slowing down either. This blog didn't exist 10 years ago and even 5 years ago, they were uncommon. Amazing growth that we take for granted now.

Search engines. Google is so new it is hard to believe what this company has done to the Internet (I should say, for the Internet). Yet, we are so accustomed to Google searches that now Google is a generic name for Internet searching, like Kleenex is to tissues.

Think of the commercial truck market as we now know it. When I started my first commercial truck operation in 1989, you had to look long and hard to find a dealer who stocked commercial upfitted trucks. We were a leader just by stocking them. Chevrolet was a real leader in opening this market up by bringing a dealer focus to stocking upfitted trucks on purpose back in 1994 with their CSV program (Commercial Specialty Vehicle). Today it is so easy to find a dealer with upfitted commercial trucks in stock that it is a surprise if you don't find at least one in most larger towns or small cities. You may even find some in small towns.

Huge expansion of this market has occurred in such a short time frame. This included the expansion of body companies and body manufacturers who became bailment pool dealers allowing and encouraging even more expansion. Even with sales being off considerably last year and this year, this market is still so much larger than it was 10-15 years ago. And, it is not nearly over with yet. Some dealers are leaving, but others will replace them that have even more of a vision of the possibilities of its success. There is much, much more to come. It is really only in a transition stage and it will become more and better than it ever was. I watched the improvements in chassis, marketing, bodies, dealers across the board in the last 20 years and I look forward with huge excitement to what possibilities lay in store.