Page 6 - HW May-June 2020

editorial
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Towards the “next normal”
PHEW, THAT WAS intense – happy to be nally coming out the other side of the best part of 10 weeks of varying levels of lockdown and restrictions!
You will have noticed that, although the team at NZ Hardware Journal worked through Level 4 from home, we weren’t allowed to print the April 2020 magazine until weeks after signing it o , which was frustrating.
Hopefully most of you will have since received your copy of the April magazine – if you’re back at work that is!
In mitigation – judging by the viewing gures which spiked in a gratifying manner – many at least had the time to read our April 2020 Digital Edition which was published early in the month.
However, with the hardware channel at large being e ectively put into a state of suspended animation, although we continued to be active online and on Facebook throughout Alert Levels 4 and 3, we were unable to produce a May magazine (hence this May-June issue).
Don’t get me wrong, justi cation for taking extreme action to stymie the virus was clearly required from a health & wellbeing perspective.
No argument there.
However, from a business perspective, despite the Government’s welcome nancial support, many pundits have
it that there’s worse to come for the economy in general, thanks to the massive hole made by COVID-19 in almost every business’s cash ow.
No criticism intended – I accept that many of the negative e ects of lockdown so far have been unavoidable by-products of Government’s focus on helping the population stay well.
But what about the longer term – and here I’m looking beyond simply reducing overheads?
e need to be agile, to adapt quickly to changing circumstances has been top of many minds during April and May.
Are you buying into new ways of doing business? Has all this actually presented opportunities? And are we looking at a “new normal” or just the “next normal”?
Making a virtue of necessity, the industry players polled for our Glues & Sealants feature (see page 26), almost all found new ways of working during lockdown that may stick for the longer term.
Talking of new normals, it’s clear that our recent experience has also driven us towards buying local, certainly at a consumer level.
Will this preference, an emotional choice, become a new normal ... once we’re back to normal? Our annual NZ Made feature (see page 20) suggests that it might!
Steve Bohling, editor steveb@mpm.nz
4 NZHJ | MAY/JUNE 2020
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