Growth? I dunno. . .

I've been thinking about growth.
My wife worked for JCPenney for 33 years. Over most of those years the company wanted her department to exceed last year's sales by x%. This never made sense to me. I mean, think about it.

 If your company is to
--maintain its real estate and infrastructure
--pay its employees a wage that will motivate them and keep them working for you
--provide a benefit package that will aid in retaining employees
--provide the best service to customers to keep them coming back
--maintain a broad product line to keep customers interested

Then doesn't it make sense that there is a limit to how much you can increase? You can strive to increase your market share, but that will require you spend more on advertising, thus cutting into potential growth. You can reduce what you pay your employees, but that will likely cause you to lose your best employees thus reducing sales and service. You can reduce benefits but that causes the same problem.

So, doesn't it make sense that if you made a reasonable profit last year and were able to keep the doors opened, the infrastructure maintained, the employees paid and happy and had enough left over to keep the stockholders paid then whatever percentage of profit you made last year should be your goal for this year?
I thought so.

How about if we expand this thinking to our economy. Maybe if we hadn't been trying to maintain growth, that is increase our national profits over the year before we wouldn't have taken a dive in '08. Yeah, yeah, I know, it was all the bankers and such that screwed us, but if we could just change our perspective--sort of metaphorically shift from a corporate agriculture mindset to a horticultural one. Let's be prosperous but instead of constant growth which by its nature unsustainable, go for stability which is.

I dunno, I only got a B+'s in Econ 101 and 102 so maybe I'm way off here. Seems to me though there was something about prices go up until there's a glut on the market then they plummet. Seems to me there was also a formula I forget for maintaining prices and thus sales at a constant rate.

But again that was a long time ago and I'm not a math guy so I could be wrong.

Maybe one of you math guys could work this out and we could tell someone in Washington about it. If you do let me know and I'll make sure you get the right Washington 'cause while I'm not a math guy, I am a geography guy and I know where stuff is and how to get there.