Try this game. See if you can figure out what types of businesses will go away first as energy gets more and more expensive.

The demise of Harry & David (You know, the company that packages up the best looking fruit and ships it all over the place for big bucks…) got me thinking that we might be able to do this. FYI, in a high-cost-of-energy world, wouldn’t shipping pretty pears across the country seem insane? (For that matter, it’s insane even when energy is cheap.)

I thought of an approach – construct a ratio of “Value provide” divided by “energy use” for each company or industry. Companies with small ratios would be closest to extinction in an energy-expensive world.

To test my approach, I raised the question in the office this morning. My business partner immediately suggested “NASCAR.” We all agreed that NASCAR uses lots of energy. What we couldn’t agree on was the “value provided.” Another co-worker joked that we should count gallons of beer consumed. If beer consumption is valuable, then NASCAR is going to be around a long time. On the other hand, if we base value on “helping mankind survive in a low-energy world,” NASCAR’s gonna score pretty low.

How would you value a business or industry? What industries do you see going away first in a high-cost-energy world?

Here are some I came up with:

• Indoor sports arenas for amateur athletics (big heated shells so kids can play soccer indoors when it’s lousy outside)
• Carwashes
• Dollar Store crap manufacturers
• Ski areas
• Malls and Big Box stores