When take-out is better than homemade

So much of what we need and want has become available in stores, ready-made, that Americans have developed a reverse snobbery about anything made from scratch.

This didn’t used to be the case – only a century ago, people oohed enviously over decorated bakery cakes and department-store clothes, while putting up their own canned goods and knitting their own lumpy sweaters because they had to. Only the rich could afford the fancy stuff made by professionals.

Now, however, we get such a staggering percentage of our goods and services from specialists in the business of providing them that the rare loaf of home-baked bread or the even rarer hand-crocheted baby blanket is greeted as if it were a Faberge egg. It’s become normal for people to have less time than money; consequently, made-it-myself stuff – from kindergartners’ Halloween costumes to crown molding - has become special, chic, the best.

Except in business. I’m not talking about the products, I’m talking about the business: Who in the world thinks keeping the books herself and writing the press releases herself and managing the inventory herself and teaching herself e-marketing late at night has any cachet?

I sure don’t. My artist contracts are not more glorious because I fill them in and print them out myself. I wish like hell I had all kinds of money to rent a big office away from my home and pay experts to speed brilliantly through the jobs I’m still struggling to figure out.  I dream of advertising and sales managers and a real staffed newsroom the way the Cratchit children dreamed of gleaming toy-shop presents and a 30-lb. roast goose.

No, a homemade business operation is not something to point out with shy pride to your dinner party guests as if it were a mahogany breakfront you’d just built or a beer you microbrewed in the basement. A homemade business operation is something you stay abashed and quiet about until you finally get capitalized and can bring in the best, most effective, already assembled, solid-thunk-when-you-slam-the-door type support your cold hard cash and good credit can buy.

Quiet, that is, unless you’re a blogger.