Busy Time
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’.
6 comments
Interesting comment about the missing things. I was going to decorate my new Jeep with a new Christmas wreath on the grill, the one I used last year is tired and pretty much on its last legs (something about having survived being on there through a blizzard and a thousand miles of highway travel!). So I head out to the stores to find a new LED-lighted wreath like the one I had on my Jeep last year and… uhm, nada. Not a one to be found. Even the battery-powered LED lights by themselvers were only available at one store, and that wasn’t in a weather-sealed box like on the old wreath.
The Wal-Mart has moved a bit of inventory back into the islands in the aisles (the islands had been *gone* for quite some time as they cut back on inventory) but definitely isn’t even as well stocked as last year.
Good times are here again? Uhm, yeah right…
– Badtux the Observant Penguin
I try to buy locally, but I have had to rely on the ‘Net more and more, as fewer things are available. The big box guys have wiped out a lot of the little retailers, and now they are drawing in, so on-line is what is available.
Down here in Podunk, AL things are somewhat better. Lots of folks shopping at the local WallyChineseMart. Target, Best Buy, Dicks, Bed & Bath and Kohls are having good sales. The Mall parking lot was full all day and at the Home Depot we are selling lots of stuff. We’re exceeding our weekly sales plan and posting positive comps over last year. Our white goods are selling well. I sold 4 fridges today along with a couple of dishwashers and laundry sets. Seeing folks use credit cards a little more especially the HD card when we’re offering the 12 mos no interest. One thing that helps in this area is our unemployment rate is about 8% so it’s not as bad here as in the big cities where you guys are located.
The housing market is still stale, but due to the tornadoes that hit back in the spring we’ve seen an uptick in sales of building supplies. Additionally, folks are remodeling instead of building new. Seeing lots of bathroom and kitchen remodels that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. The folks would just have build a new house instead of remodeling.
Dave, I’m in Okaloosa County, Florida, due South of Montgomery, and Eglin AFB makes our unemployment rate look better than it really is, because the base is stable. The local non-military economy is still trying to find solid ground after the meltdown and the BP oil spill.
I hate to say it, but a hurricane would have helped boost things around here. Construction was a major part of our economy and it is flat. We have a lot of ‘partial built’ homes along the coast, which will probably have to be leveled rather than finished if things ever pick up.
I’m glad something is happening anywhere, because it all helps to get things moving.
During the late Roman empire, towns and cities gradually lost any economic reason for being and disappeared, their populations slowly migrating to the bigger cities or to Rome itself or onto the latifundia as the early prototypes of medieval serfs. Even the countryside started being slowly deserted, as farmers gave up in the face of constant banditry and tax farming (same basic effect). The end result was an economy in free fall, where the empire year after year lost to ability to feed, clothe, and arm armies in the field, as the number of men in arms declined year after year, until finally the barbarians overran everything and the whole house of cards collapsed.
We’ve bred our own barbarians here in the USA, so we won’t need outside ones. But it took less than 100 years for the final collapse of the Roman Empire. We’re 30 years down that road. Hopefully I’ll be dead before the end, because when the final collapse came, probably 50% of the population of the Roman Empire ended up dead, either from starvation, war, disease, or exposure/homelessness.
There is an outside chance that people will finally come to their senses after the first string of riots and get things back on track, but the riots are looking more and more inevitable. The Occupy movement was a good way to release some of the pressure, but the militarized police actions are making things worse.