Private security became a $50 billion industry while violent crime fell. Read that again. Crime goes down. Security spending goes up. Someone failed basic economics and it wasn't the security companies.
High-profile attacks drive the spending. Not actual crime rates. Not statistical risk. Just whatever made it onto the evening news that week. A guy in Toledo sees a shooting in Portland on his phone and hires three guards to watch his dentist office. This is rational behavior in a society that confused television with reality.
Communities are hiring guards. Companies are hiring guards. Everyone's hiring guards to protect them from a threat that's been declining for years. It's like buying flood insurance while the lake evaporates. Except the insurance costs $50 billion and stands in your lobby wearing a polo shirt.
The brilliant part? The security companies don't even need crime to go up. They just need you to think it might. CNN does the marketing for free. Fox News writes the sales copy. MSNBC closes the deal. The guards show up and stand there while absolutely nothing happens because nothing was going to happen anyway.
Guard employment is climbing. Which means thousands of people now have jobs protecting other people from problems that are statistically disappearing. We invented an entire labor category based on vibes and cable news B-roll.
This is the purest business model ever created. Sell a solution to a problem that's solving itself. Watch your customers ignore every data point that contradicts their fear. Scale infinitely because human stupidity scales infinitely. The margins must be f*cking incredible.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately googled "security guard ETF" while sitting in the safest decade in modern American history.
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