NaBloPoMo

The stock market, which normally acts like a group of 13 year-olds hyped up on too much sugar, dropped more than 4% just before yesterday’s closing bell. Some of that drop had to do with reported losses from Freddie Mac (Freddie Mac ruins everything) and changes in the rates for Treasury Bills. The bulk of it, though, had to do with the drop in consumer spending in October.

The numbers released yesterday reflect a 2.8% decline in consumer spending in October and a 4.1% decline from October 2007. This report reflects the largest monthly decline since the Commerce Department started keeping this index in 1992. Since personal consumption spending accounts for 70% of the U.S. GDP^*, if people aren’t out there spending their money on stuff the economy naturally shrinks. And while it’s perfectly valid to look at the spending numbers – a 5.5% drop in automobile sales and a 2.2% drop in retail sales excluding automobiles – combined with the rise in the unemployment rate (6.5% in October which is a bullshit number any way because it doesn’t take into account people who have dropped off unemployment roles because they are no longer eligible to collect unemployment, people who are underemployed (want to work full-time but can’t find a job that lets them), and people who have just plain stopped looking) as a measure of consumers’ outlook on the economy I think there’s also another reason why people have stopped buying stuff: There’s nothing to buy.

I will grant you that DC-proper (vs. DC metro which includes the suburbs) isn’t necessarily the best yardstick by which to measure the availability of goods. Smart retailers will stock their outlets with the products that move at those locations which is why you’re not going to see a lot of high end washers and dryers at an in-city outlet of a chain store but you might see three different models of stacked apartment washer and dryer combos. Thing of it is, I think the retailers have gotten stupid.

Circuit City, which has been in trouble since they laid off 3,400 of their most experienced salesclerks in April 2007, recently declared bankruptcy and announced they were closing 155 of their 700 stores. Now, Circuit City has been a feature in the DC area for over 25 years but the thing of it is that in that time I’ve only ever successfully made one purchase there.

Most of the time this is how it would go: I’d go in to look at a piece of electronic equipment (TV, stereo component, what have you) and I’d either be ignored so hard by the salesclerk that I had to go searching for someone to fill out a ticket and take my money or I’d have the clerk giving me an anal probe to prod me to buy. Invariably, I’d make my purchase and take my ticket to the merchandise counter. Someone would take my ticket and disappear behind the plastic sheeting only to return enough minutes later that I was frustrated to tell me that nope, sorry, they didn’t have any of those in the back despite what the salesclerk’s computer said. At which point I’d spend another 15 to 20 minutes at the customer service desk to get my money back. Then I’d go to either a local shop or to Best Buy and get something equally good for about the same price. The problem is that lately all of my brick & mortar shopping experiences have been like visiting Circuit City.

I was at Best Buy yesterday because, well, it was proximate to what I was doing and I wanted to pick up a copy of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. I also wanted to fill in a few holes in my DVD collection (Burglar, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and the 50th Anniversary edition of Touch of Evil (deal with it)). Admittedly, two of these movies are more than 20 years old so it wasn’t a shock to not find them. What was a shock was that not only did the Best Buy I was in not have a copy of the Touch of Evil anniversary edition, which was released within the last 60 days, none of the 9 Best Buy stores in the metro area had one either.

Now, I could write this off to Best Buy sucking camel nuts if I hadn’t had the exact same experience, minus the clerk looking at me dumbly and mumbling “what’s Touch of Evil?”, at Borders not two weeks ago. And if I hadn’t had a similar experience at both the Office Depot outlets in the DC area when I went to look for recycled printer paper; not only did neither outlet have it in stock the clerks had never even heard of it. The story was the same at Target last weekend when I went to look for new rugs; half the shelves were empty.

So yeah, people aren’t spending money in the retail market because they’re worried about whether or not they’re going to have a job in a month, or two, or six. They’re not spending it because the difference between the price of gas/gallon the price of a gallon of milk never varies by more than 15 cents. They’re not spending money because health insurance premiums are going up and like everything else that goes up the price never quite drops back down to the level it was at before it started to cost more.

But maybe, just maybe, they aren’t spending as much money in the retail market because when they get to the mall there just isn’t anything to buy.

^* Dr. Wikipedia says the best way to understand Gross Domestic Product is to think of it thusly:
GDP = consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports)

Hey, I’m entitled. See the blog title right up there? It allows for a little randomness.

• Why is it you hardly ever see pet found flyers?
  I was over on the other side of town today and posted all up and down the avenue were flyers reading “Found: Brown Beagle” with a date and a description and I got to wondering: why is it that you hardly ever see found pet flyers? Lost pet flyers, complete with heart rending picture of said beloved furry friend, abound but found pet flyers are few and far between. I wonder about this in particular since our streets aren’t covered in the corpses of pampered house pets who just happened to squeeze out between their human’s legs and the door while the human signed for that UPS package, so where do all these lost pets end up? I do remember when I adopted my pets from the shelter I had to have a home visit and when I asked the woman why she said that one of the reasons was that people sometimes adopted pets and then turned around and sold them to medical labs. The mind reels.
• Where do cravings come from and how can I make them stop?
  OK, I get it: if my electrolytes are low I often crave salt. Around a certain point in the month I want protein. But where the hell does the craving for curry lahksa come from? Seriously, in my genetic heritage spicy broth, chicken, green beans, noodles, and tofu not so much with the race memory.
• Why are phone menu systems so fuzzydumb?
  I’m trying to roll my 401k plan money out of my employer’s chosen institution (they aren’t managing my investments, I’m doing that myself, and they’re the only investment house to ever charge me a maintenance fee) but getting through their phone menu system is like trying to read ancient Sumerian. Yes, I want to talk to a counselor. OK, yes, I have a question about withdrawals but the menu you just sent me to doesn’t have an option for that. I finally just called back and entered all zeros when they asked for my social security number. That got me a live person right quick. Still, is it any wonder why people are pissed off by the time they get to the representative?

And finally, do you know your personal dewey decimal number? I have two:

It’s a yearly ritual and companies both big and small…the annual review. It starts with the self-evaluation form in which you have to balance your opinion of yourself – why yes, thank you, I’m spectacular; I’m glad you asked – with something that tempers that so your supervisor has room to suggest improvements in your performance – this makes your boss feel like he or she actually has something to do.

The next step is going through that review. Your supervisor has to reconcile your view of yourself with the feedback from your coworkers and with his or her own impressions of your work. Then the hard part: the confrontation. Your boss is forced to evaluate you to your face.

If that goes well, you get to the salary negotiation phase during which your boss tries to put a monetary price on your value to the company. And no matter how much it is, it’s never enough.

And no matter how much somehow there’s always this unspoken vibe that you should be grateful for what you’re getting, lucky to have made it through your review and still have a job. The entire review structure, making you evaluate your own performance, wondering what anonymous feedback your colleagues have given your supervisor, having to be polite while your supervisor details your perceived strengths and weaknesses and makes concrete suggestions for improvements, the whole thing is designed to put you on the defensive.

The thing of it is, your annual review is one of the few opportunities you have as an employee to get yourself on a better footing with your employer. Most people blow their primary opportunity which is at hire. The only other time, which is pretty dicey anyway, is if you have another offer from another employer. By then, though, you’re pretty much out the door anyway.

Today my boss offered me 5% which is nothing to sneeze at in this economy and in the state the organization I work for is in but in the spirit of expansiveness that has pervaded the country since the election I asked for what I wanted: more time.

Given that America is the only industrialized nation in the world that has no legal minimum for vacation, time is worth more to me at this point that money. After all, it’s the only thing you ever really run out of.

I’m gradually realizing how important music really is to me. Three years of XMRadio will do that do you. Tonight I’m heading over to The Birchmere Music Hall to see Bob Schneider, one of my favorite working musicians. If you haven’t heard him, check him out. If you’re not interested in checking out some new music, take a wander over to the Utne Reader for their take on the near-biological connection between music and mood.

Update: 23:25

As blog entries go, this one was pretty much crap. So, I share with you my double geeky treasure. Since it was a really good Bob show I went ahead and bought the live CD…then I got it autographed. My name (which is still there in hard copy), the smudgy thing at the top was blurred to protect the extraordinarily geeky.

As part of my job I have to read and deal with the messages that are sent in from our supporters in response to blast e-mails we send them about issues, activism opportunities, or pleas for their money. Before the election, back when gas was topping $4.35 a gallon, we sent one about off shore drilling and why it’s bad. Naturally, we got a lot of vitrolic responses back from people who are tired of paying out the proverbial for gas, and people who just generally have their heads up their asses.

One thing that stuck out for me, though, was this particularly well reasoned response. The typos are all from the original; the commentary is all mine:

You idiots, we can no longer afford for those greedy middle easterners to take a shit on solid gold toilets!

As a Floridian I am all for drilling in the gulf, in Alaska and anywhere we have oil reserves.

What you should be fighting for are cars with high gas mpg ratings to be affordable to those who can least afford them.

Funny, our supporters in Michigan tell us that higher fuel efficiency would kill what is left of the American auto industry. Perhaps you should duke it out.

People like me who has only a 1998 Ford F-150 pick up that gets 12 mpg but can’t afford a $35,000 for a car that gets 30 mpg.

Right now people are loosing their homes and jobs as a direct result of the high price of oil and YOU WANT TO MAKE IT EVEN MORE EXPENSIVE!!!!

No, people are losing their homes because they don’t live small enough to deal with changes in market prices over which they have no damn control. Because yeah, a $2,000 flat screen HD TV is a “necessity.”

The biggest problem with you “Young and inexperienced” tree huggers is you can’t see the forest for the tree your hugging!

You weren’t born back when we had gas rations back in the 1970’s as you tool around in the brand new economy car your rich daddy’s bought you.

Um…the average age at this organization is 45. Our CEO is pushing 55, and I personally remember waiting in gas rationing lines both on the East and West Coasts of this country. And I paid off my 60 month car loan in 37 months by not buying lunch out for nearly three years so where is my rich daddy again?

I am 50 years old and have lost almost everything. I can barely afford to feed my family, why? HIGH GAS PRICES!!!!!

This country is in a recession, not because of the Bush administration but because of your hero the Clintons. Changes take a while before there felt and the Clintons had a better economy because of Regan’s economics and the internet explosion of the 1980’s.

Oh, you mean the economics that brought us a recession in 1982 and a recession in 1987? Given that the first dial-up ISP opened in the U.S. in 1989 and the first web browser wasn’t developed until 1993 I’d hardly call the internet explosion a feature of the 1980s. Perhaps you mean the 1990s?

Your boy’s and girl’s; the dummycrates have had control of the congress and senate for how long now(?) and both alone has more power then the president, are things better now?

That would be less than 24 months when you wrote this but I’d hardly call 51 seats in the Senate and 234 in the House controlling the legislature.

I’m certain I won’t receive a response to this email as your blinders and ear plugs will send it right into the delete folder because you have all been brain washed.

No, you won’t receive a response because I have real work to do and you are totally certain you are correct so why should I waste my precious time trying to convince you otherwise?

You may not know it but you and those like you are pushing America into a socialist state. Take that from someone who was born by parents who lived through the Great Depression, someone who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the Cold War.

When you have that under your belt you might see things a little differently.

I’m a tweener child of a pre-WWII baby. I have been in the wrong place at the wrong time my entire life: AIDS hit before I got to take advantage of the sexual revolution; the recession left us by the Keating Five scandal (hum..unregulated financial markets and banks investing in the most risky manner possible cause a deep recession…does any of that sound familiar?) in the early ’90s pretty much shoved me and most of my generation right into grad school because there were no jobs; by the time I did get a job I was making a pittance which means I didn’t get to ride the dot com boom and get any profit out of that and now I’m hitting middle age just as we’re reaping the fruits of the neo-cons’ greed and deregulation. No, I have no idea what hardship might be like. And WTF does the Cold War have to do with the price of gas, exactly?

You know what a Republican is? A Democrat that grew up!

Gee, I always thought a Republican was a Democrat that had been mugged…but I digress. Let me quote your most famously regarded Republican hero to ask are you better off than you were four years ago? How about eight? Yeah, I thought so. Please engage brain before hitting send next time, and thank you so much for your feedback.

What scares me is that this guy probably votes. What scares me even more is that for the next few decades Florida is still poised to be a swing state in national elections.