One of the major problems in our current state of black America is we got a lot of folks bumping their gums but got no real skills when it comes to zero hour, the real thing. This “fake it until you make it” been going on for decades where black folks pretend to be “net worth” millionaires, act like the music video they just released is better than Michael Jackson Thriller and act like that dude/chick they showing off to us is not a burning garbage trash bin – that’s how we black folks been carrying ourselves, always trying to look a part instead of being a part.

We are facing one of the biggest challenge moments in the black community right now that is unprecedented since the Great Depression. This is a devastating event ahead of us and we better start figuring out how we doing to get through this upcoming problem we facing right now. And that means learning how to start working with what we got and leveraging stuff we used to do to come up with new creative ways to not allow what happened to us before happen to us again without a damn fight.

Businesses Are Ordered to Shut Down

Right now, there is state-mandated business shutdowns and this had severely impacted black-owned businesses in our community that were trying to establish economic empowerment:

Restaurants. The majority of food service business run very thin profit margins and too many risks avoidance costs like food inspections, ordering raw ingredients at market prices and so on. They cannot keep paying their employees and have to furlough their staff. if their staff even come back, they have to re-learn everything or hire someone new to train and that takes time to get back up.

Specialty Retail. A lot of retail products already expired and the retailer have their cash all in that depreciating inventory that is not selling. Cannot do a winter/spring clearance event in April and cannot order new inventory as orders from China are delayed. Thieves are targeting commercial buildings knowing no one is out and about during the lockdown and curfew.

Hair Stylists. There is now going to be trust issue with hair stylists. Do you trust that black barbershop or black hair salon with all these black folks running around in packs, creeping at someone else house now getting their hair done at the same hair place you go to? There will likely be a permanent change in business model on how black barbers operate after all of this is over.

Bars and Clubs. By shutting down, there is no one to sit down and get a pour from the shelf which is the majority of revenue and profit margins. Bartenders and servers don’t have people to tip them and they been let go as well.

Sharing Services. Home sharing as well as ride sharing has been ordered to shut down as well which was income for people who wanted to earn money outside of a job setting. They still have to pay a car note or a house note on assets they cannot share to generate revenue.

I’m at the grocery store and see people who worked at these places we just discussed unpacking and shelving toilet paper, putting themselves at health risks to keep a paycheck coming in. With the economic downturn about to wipe out a lot of middle class black employees who going to catch hell trying to find a new job, the black consumerism power is not even going to be there the next six months of 2020 to uphold these black-owned business once businesses are allowed to open up again.

We Know What the 2020 Fallout Going to Be

Even if we get over this virus spread, we are still going to see economic fallout that is going to be really bad if we choose to repeat the same process.

Run Out of Unemployment and Savings. That whole logic of saving months of your salary – from 2008 crisis, we seen black folks take almost 2 years to find a job and they had 3-6 months of savings or severance that ran out dry.

Black Businesses Will Shut Down. Many businesses will simply close and leave our commercial districts vacate again with only predatory lenders moving in and opening up shop.

Crime and Illicit Activity Goes Up. No money coming in, people will turn to crime and illegal trade and trafficking and will do their illegal business in open air markets in front of your home.

Charlatans Sell False Hope and Distraction. Where you think these clowns on YouTube selling hustle books come from? They came from the 2008 crisis. They will once again show up selling distracted and dishonest content to their desperate and poorly educated black audience who will follow them instead of handle business.

Black Media Will Go Negative. Never helpful in a crisis, black media resort to trying to make everything funny, play negative music of rappers bragging about how much money they got, black dudes making it rain on black women, black women singing about tricking off on black men and so on. Or those cornball stories where some 9-year-old black kid created shoe taps that wards off COVID-19 in order to inspire and motivate us.

We been through these events and we know how it turns out horrible, it’s time to pull out them paws and do something different, fight this oncoming economic devastation about to hit us and just don’t roll over. We need to figure out solutions with what we can do right now and we got to get like MacGyver on this stuff.

Existing Pattern: Taxi Dispatcher

Back in the last century when you call and request a cab, a dispatcher would use a radio band and a call signal to a cab to pick up a customer at a certain location. The taxi company would have their own frequency band the cabs would subscribe to and the dispatcher would get on the radio and say something like “cab 1, need you at 15th and Madison to pick up a customer” and the cab would have instructors to pick up a customer. This was the old school of running a taxi company and also an ambulance service as well.

What if we use this old school manner of dispatching to establish a wide-area network to facilitate food delivery and queued shopping in our communities? Instead of a frequency band where everyday people don’t have citizen band radios, we use another old school technique – pirate FM radio or bootleg radio where everyday people can just use their car radio to tune into an FM radio to get information on their order status.

We ain’t got time to build a new app and thin margin businesses struggling to stay afloat cannot afford to take on the cost of paying UberEats and GrubHub which those services are expensive as hell, like 10% - 15% of the order. What we do got is what we got now, people can call in their food order, they get a number code, the car can show up and customer stay in car, when their order ready, they hear it over the radio by a host who can keep people attention with the gift of gabbing and run all of this within our own community.  Let’s discuss this scenario.

Retail Traffic Controlling

Retail traffic controller is like an air traffic controller and their job is to coordinate communication status of trade orders between customers and businesses within our community. If you look at the diagram above, you will actually see a cycle loop that can quickly grow as a revenue model. A person setup a FM radio like 91.8 people can tune into using the same technology your church or those real estate signs tell you to tune into but this radio station go up to 3-mile range. They also setup a simple web site for restaurants to enter the order description and customer number they assigned to the customer that made an order – this should be just a text form that press enter and call it a day – nothing complex.

The cycle is the following:

Customer call via phone. The customer calls in the business and place an order what they want. The business writes down the order and give them an order code to write down. The business tells them to listen to 91.8FM to get an order status so the business can focus on taking more orders instead of people asking about their order.

Business send code to radio dispatcher. The business has a web page open with two text box fields – the order number and description of the food. The web form should have hidden form fields to pass the business billing code – this is used to charge the business for submitting the order. Once the order is submitted, the business will have another list of orders to update the order status such as not started, processing and ready.

Radio dispatcher make announcements. The radio dispatcher has a web page on their tablet and see the new order code and order description and status. The radio dispatcher is always talking to the radio audience like a radio host announcing which order has started and what order is ready. The radio dispatcher will say things like “order 123 at hot wings café is ready, come pick up your 12-piece wings with blue cheese sauce” or “man it’s a beautiful day on the West Side of Chicago!” while playing local artists tracks in the background, literally creating a radio show people are active listening to.

Customers drives to parking lot and listen. The customer drives up to the restaurant and tune their radio to 91.5 FM and listen to the programming. At this time, the radio dispatcher is promoting other business names and what products they selling, give some sport scores update and other news around the hood. The cars in the parking lot are staggered to allow social distancing and people have to stay in their car until their order is ready. When someone order is called, they can get out their car walk up to the restaurant and get their order or the order is brought out to them.

People listen in on the chatter. People in their regular house will hear about the radio station from the restaurants telling them to tune into 91.5FM, word of mouth spread and people listen in on other people ordering food. What you think will happen next? That person will want to order too and the radio dispatcher is on the air giving out the phone number of the restaurant to call and place an order for their hot wing special. This create a whole new cycle of customers.

And guess who else get word? Other restaurants and businesses who now want their name and orders shout on 91.5FM instead of paying impression advertising for that garbage hip-hop station degrading our black women and our black community.  

I want you to notice something about this cycle – notice the restaurant just have to take orders and update orders and if the radio guy got the orders coming – they stand to make more money and revenue per day than sit-in dining using this mass media system to promote their hustle.

Equipment

You can buy a radio transmitter on Amazon for about $100 that can go a good distance but make sure you understand something – if you interfere with someone else radio frequency you can have some serious problems on your hand. You need to know the frequency you will use and, in some cases, you can be issued an FCC license for smaller broadcasters, but we kinda in an economic emergency right and we need to keep businesses going.

Be mindful these radios can get very hot for the transmission and should be away from the house or any building and they can burn the skin if you touch the metal casing as well. In this model, the broadcasting hours should reflect business hours of 10am to 8pm similar. There are plenty of good web sites on setting up these bootleg radio stations and there is free DJ radio software out there to run commercials.  

People should have radios in their cars to tune into a radio station. Now there is more than FM radio – you can still use a web site to update order status.

Revenue Model

The revenue comes from the orders, the restaurant signs up at a web site and get a user/password. When the restaurant wants to get orders, they login to the web site and they enter that order information in the fields. Once they press submit, they are billed and an invoice can be sent via PayPal or have the businesses since money to the DJ via mobile payment platforms.

There are additional revenue streams to incorporate. As indicated previously in this article, you can charge to mention the business name and what they sell in between orders. You can charge for advertising since you will have a REAL AUDIENCE engaged listening for their order or listening to what other people are ordering in your black community.

But guess what else you can do? You don’t have to do just food – you can queue up people to visit a barbershop that don’t want a lot of people in their stores or walkup – cats can wait in their cars. The radio dispatcher can announce a barber is wrapping up and appointment 123 can get ready. Same with laundromats and other businesses in our community. So you can gain more customers than just restaurants in the community and get new establishments signed up.

And you know why I brought up the taxi dispatcher in the beginning? Because guess what else you can do when you ready to expand? That’s right – you can run the delivery business yourself and have cats pick up and deliver the orders and tell customers their food is coming.

Challenge and Response

There is one major challenge to implementing this model - transmission interference. Someone can easily purchase a transmitter and use the same 95.1FM band and start interfering with your communication, disrupting your ability to reach your customers.

One way to mitigate this or prepare for this is have more than one transmitter to use additional signals such as 88.4FM to 90.3FM and list all three instead of just one. Now if someone coming after all 3 stations, you going to have someone actively trying to come at you - our folks do that when they see you making money off your hustle. The truth is, if it comes to this, you are probably going to have to seek an alternative method of communication as you cannot control the airwaves.

Black Economic Empowerment Radio

What this article has done was show you how to convert existing things around us and repurpose to fight the economy downturn we are facing or the situation we are in. This radio dispatch station is promoting black business, black transactions in our black community and what people are listening to is real information. The entire radio program is transaction from advertising someone e-book drop during announcing orders to signing on a new local client or setting up another station in another hood in this country and keep expanding.

We don’t have to listen to garbage black radio push negative music down our throats and everybody on online streaming platforms anyway. Your radio dispatching station just created an inexpensive and quick way to help black restaurants turn into ghost kitchens, help business stores and services accommodate queuing and appointment booking and you broadcasting to an widespread audience. The only drawback is you keep talking about someone order hot wings, oxtails, catfish sandwiches, shrimp po boys are ready for pickup over the airwaves all day, you going to get really hungry just like your audience will.