WORDS FROM W.W. January 14, 2018
This past week a fast food Mexican restaurant chain in Colorado Springs announced it was closing its five stores. There were no protests, no calls to reconsider. Someone or ones had made the unfortunate decision to open each of these establishments in areas where other Mexican restaurants like Taco Bell, Chipotle, and Fuzzy’s Tacos were already established. At least three of the five restaurants were either next to or across the street from Chick-Fil-A establishments. It made me wonder if part of their business plan was to get the overflow business from Chick-Fil-A, which is always crowded!
Each store was new construction. You would think that if one store wasn’t getting business it might tend to make the company think twice before building a second store, let alone four more stores!
It reminds me of a time several years ago when I was picking up my friend, Artie Powers, at the airport. As I walked with him down to baggage claim I noticed several women were giving me looks and smiling. I thought to myself, “I must be looking good today. I am a handsome dude!” My step got a little more strut to it. As we stood by the baggage claim carousel Artie suddenly leaned over and whispered to me, “Your barn door is open!”
“What?”
“Your fly’s open!”
My sense of what was reality had been trumped by my naivety! My infatuation with my mirage of an image had blinded me to the underlying truth.
Stupidity follows closely behind in the shadow of the naive.
Solomon had a lot to say about naive stupidity. He usually summarized the person’s reputation by just calling him/her a “fool”!
“All who are prudent act with knowledge, but fools expose their folly.” (Proverbs 13:16)
That verse gave new meaning to my walking through an airport unzipped for the world to see!
There’s a difference between wise speculation and foolish schemes! Clueless fools are nearsighted in their perspective and rarely think about what’s on the other side of the hill that they can’t clearly see.
In recent years I’ve adopted a couple of principles to live by. I always check my zipper before walking through airports…and if it sounds too good to be true it probably is!
Words from WW Blog 