One Week at a Time

We made it another week. Maybe that's all we can do right now and if so, then so be it. Now the goal is to keep the doors open till next Friday. One week at a time.

I'm still sort of shell-shocked at how things have been going. And it's not just us. The "big" companies are having their own problems and when things go bad for them, it affects us as well. Recently, AMD had some issues come to light when the Sheriff's office sent deputies out to enforce a lock-out of the employees due to non-payment of property taxes. It cost AMD $8.8 million to get those doors open and people back to work. Of course in the last two weeks, AMD also announced a layoff of 35% of its Austin workforce; that's 1200 employees locally. I'm notoriously bad at math but my numbers say 420 people lost their jobs. And that's not all, when vendors submitted invoices for payment on open purchase orders, those vendors were informed the POs had been closed out. Now follow me here - Imagine you're a small company and your largest customer is AMD and they've just informed you that they aren't going to pay their bills. What? They owe you thousands of dollars! You can't pay your vendors who are also clamoring for their money; the bank wants payment for the line of credit they extended to you a couple of months ago when AMD refused to pay any invoices during December; and aside from all of that, you have your own bills to pay, which are already late, and your employees know that getting a paycheck might not happen this week or even this month. How do you not lose hope that everything will work out? How do you keep from throwing in the towel and saying "I give up"? Coming from someone who's watching all this from the playing field, my answer is simple: I don't have a clue but as long as the door's open and the lights are on, we'll be there - one week at a time.

NOTE: We are NOT the small company mentioned above but we know them and know all this to be true.