That's right Chicken Little...shut up or die.
Is anyone else besides me sick and tired of listening to doom and gloom media reports about the economy? I sure as hell am. Not a day goes by without negative headlines, where media induced fear mongering is the plat du jour. Yes, the economy is not what is was last year…duh. The turning point was mid to late September, when the first shoe dropped and early October when the other one fell…with a large boom. Everyone experienced a shift in the economic free fall. OK….it happened. We must all learn to shift our perspective and spending accordingly. Today, I am reading in the business section in The New York Times about the expected shortfall for back-to-school shopping. Yoo hoo…of course that was going to happen. Last year at this time everything was still coming up roses(ish). How about looking at this report from the “good news” perspective. Most of the people I know lost somewhere between 20-40% of their income (if not their jobs entirely) as a result of the Wall Street hucksters. So when I was reading the report in The Times, things were not as bad as it could have been, if you ask me.
“A report this week by IBISWorld, a research company, found that back-to-school spending would fall in nearly every category compared with last year: clothing, down 5.4 percent; footwear, down 4.4 percent; and electronics, down 1.8 percent. Sales of traditional school supplies like notebooks and pencils are expected to be about the same as last year.”
Now, am I in denial or does this seem to be a better case scenario than what it could have been? OK…retail sales are not swelling, and things are not quite there…where…I don’t know…but there. But people are still buying things. And the fact remains, that we need to shake out a good percentage of the crap that has filled this country’s retail establishments that created the overblown, credit card-obsessed economy. Did we need as many retail developed centers and the endless gentrification in our urban areas? How many Ann Taylor‘s do we need anyway? Why must every street in New York City have to be a shopping destination? It is high time we looked at the shopping monster that we have ALL created. Did we think the beast would prevail? It never does. Go see any horror movie. So, what now? Well, if you ask me, those companies that were hell bent on making the beast live large…this is your time to adjust to the new economy. Shed some layers, close down what cannot be maintained, create more parks and green markets…and stop comparing apples to oranges.
