Your business would have been bankrupt. We're you incorporated or a sole proprietorship?
I'm sure your did a good job running your business, but you were in a heavily subsidize industry and society put a lot into making it possible.
That's not a slight on you. You need to understand that the conditions that allowed to you to go to school without debt (before you dropped out) and the conditions that allowed you to build a business are gone, replaced with a wages worth half of what they were then, tuitoon that's double or tripled and favored status for large corporations giving them huge advantage over small businesses.
And you're the one voting to make that happen. You pulled up the ladder after you got yours.
You start out by saying that "your business would have been bankrupt". I already told you that I succeeded and didn't need to file bankruptcy and wouldn't have filed anyway.
That business was as a sole proprietor.
I completely agree that it didn't take nearly the investment to start a business back then as it does today. But that doesn't detract from the risk I took. I still risked everything that I had.
You keep saying subsidies and society. Obviously I couldn't have succeeded without society. It's hard to survive without customers in a retail business.
I have no idea what you're talking about regarding subsidies. Whatever subsidies the oil industry had in 1970 didn't help me. I didn't get any subsidies. But that's irrelevant anyway because had I benefited by subsidies so to would have my competition benefited so it still would have been a level playing field.
You have a bad picture of the whole situation. I had been managing a restaurant for an absentee owner and decided that if I could successfully run a restaurant, which I consider to be the most difficult business to succeed in, then I could start my own business.
Like I said this was a Texaco station that had been boarded up for 6 years. It closed when the interstate highway was opened. I drove by it everyday on the way to the restaurant I ran. So I decided to open it up again since the suburbs had grown and that highway had become busy again.
Ultimately I needed to buy the property so that I could tear down that building and build a modern gas station and I added a car wash and convenience store. But the gas station business was changing and the major oil companies were taking back their dealer operated stations and building discount pumper stations which took away the advantage I had with being a discount station. The oil companies were upstream companies meaning they owned oil fields, refineries and retail locations. I couldn't compete with that so I sold out to one of them and that's when I moved to Arizona.
I had a good 11 year run though. I survived the oil embargo in 1973 and again in 1979 and was the first gas station in Ohio to have what was then called gasahol. 10 % ethanol in the gas.
With regards to your last sentence about I voted to make it happen you don't know how I vote and what the hell happened? Then you say that I pulled up the ladder after I got mine. Again what the hell does that mean.
I have no idea what your problem is but it's obvious you can't stand to see someone succeed.
Please ask me what I did for a living after I moved to AZ. Because I started all over again and this time in a construction business that I started despite never having done any construction in my life.
Oh but I admit that I needed society to purchase my construction products to be successful.