Badtux noted empty stores in the Bay Area, and I’m seeing the same thing here. Black Friday may have been it for the season.

It isn’t just a lack of customers, it is also a lack of merchandise. I buy stocking stuffers, and they aren’t available. All of the cheap Christmas jewelry is absent, as stores are stocking more generic products, and the gaudy sweatshirts are also missing. The aisles are open without the obstacle course of additional displays that were commonplace.

Supermarkets were crowded the first couple of days of the month, but even they have fallen off, with the exception the commissary on the Air Base. My Mother insists on buying certain things there, and military is still getting paychecks, so things are still crowded there. It is a marked contrast with what is happening outside.

I got called to help out a friend with a computer problem at one of his rental units. The tenant needed high speed Internet access and The Cable Company was saying that the coax needed to be replaced before it would work, and DSL isn’t available at the site.

It turned out that there was wireless access available, but the tenant couldn’t get it to work. So I hauled my laptop out there and was connected to the WiFi immediately, and told them there were a dozen different wireless connections available. It turned out that the tenant had replaced their laptop with desktop, and the desktop didn’t have WiFi capabilities. A quick trip to a local computer store, and the problem was resolved with a USB adapter.

The tenant assumed that WiFi was built-in to all computers, and didn’t know how to check for it. Assumed knowledge on the part of the ‘professionals’.