They ain't buyin' nothin'.
And if they are, only if it's 70% off.
February 9, 2009
Do you get the sense people are still going to the mall, still running around town, still behaving like everything is normal... but..
They ain't buyin' nothin'.
And if they are, only if it's 70% off.
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Being one of your european readers the one thing that strikes me the most about that picture is 'Where is the bike lane?', 'Why is there no place to park a bike outside the store?'.
No wonder you got so many fat people in your country.
NO, the tide has turned.
Sales are way down.
I have sisters that work in retail. There is no stock coming in because no one is buying.
There are all kinds of sales and games going on to get people to buy.
If consumer spending was 70 percent of the economy and it is down 30 percent, that's a big hit to the economy.
And I don't think it will come back very soon. Social pressure has changed. That's the biggest influence on any society.
No, there's too much fear over the future.
But ipod phones are selling like hotcakes, the economy's booming right??
But Dopes said......
This is scary. I was in Home Depot on Saturday and there were maybe 20 customers in the store. On a beautiful 60F day in NoVa, this place would normally be bustling. One floor worker joked with another 'hey, any customers yet?' I was there to pick up replacement bulb for a 14.4v flashlight. That was all I bought. Normally, I would have picked up other stuff. Anything. You know, stuff I 'need'. Not now. Not now.
I work for a company that does supermarket refrigeration and commercial HVAC. We have seen some stores closing in our area, and the remaining ones tightening down on repairs. Around the Christmas shopping season it seemed that everyone was still shopping as usual. However these days almost everywhere i go, big box stores and malls are ghost towns. Even with 70-80% off, nobody is buying. Give all of this 6 months, and it's going to be really, really ugly out there, and I probably won't have a job anymore either.
It's all rigged.
Turn out the lights, the partys OVER.
America, turd world nation of nothing.
The last boom for Boomers is their mouth, for its the last thing they have not bankrupted yet. Supermarkets are filled with the fattest generation in the history of the world filling their faces, satiating their 10 year old maturity.Seems that the culture of shopping is to get validation and domination; shopping is not just about shopping. Now that Boomers have bankrupted themselves, the big ticket purchases are over. They will now start to downsize as they are getting older. Many people, Obama supporters, think they are somehow getting new stimulus checks soon to keep the shopping going. Most McCain supporters I know are so shell shcoked they have already prepared for the comming depression. Malls are looking bad with closed stores. People do go to the mall, but there is a lot of mall walking. But the food area is always packed.
FOOLS R US
Fool us once (9/11 'terrorist' attacks): Shame on us.
Fool us twice ('war on terror'): Shame on you.
Fool us three times (Wall Street bailouts): Piss on ya! We're takin' our toyz n goin' home!
Anonymous European reader, have you ever tried to walk from one American store to another? Not the ones adjacent to each other in a mall, but stores in seperate shopping areas. It's damned hard, because the parking lots are HUUUUUGE, like 100 metres across, then there's a busy road, and another 100-metre parking lot to cross before the next store.
That would be great fat-prevention exercise if Americans walked from place to place. But of course they don't, because America is not designed for walking or biking. You're supposed to drive your car. It's a land of gargantuan emptiness.
On the bright side, all that empty space will make it easy to lay the tram lines when the oil runs out!
On the upside, the big Goodwill store that I browse in once a week (actually pick up a desirable antique or collectable every once in a while) is going gangbusters.
It's actually starting to look a little sparse in spots, and not for want of donations either. They have even RAISED their price ranges. (You know, like $4 for any pair of jeans went to $6.50, that sort of thing.)
The local dollar store, also gangbusters, is going soooo good it should move down to the big anchor store slot down at the other end of the strip mall. God knows the food chain doesn't need the slot.
I don't see how they stay open?
There's always an up side to every down!
We are in the new economy - the Thrift Economy. Old habits die very hard, so our most popular form of programmed entertainment - shopping - will not go away. We will just be shopping in a different way. We will still, like confused lemmings, flock to stores, but it will be Walmarts and Dollar Stores and Goodwills. We will look but mostly not buy, saving our dwindling cash for the food courts and fast food restaurants, drowning our sorrows in ketchup and mustard.
My Brother has been spouting off since Christmas about how everyone is making a bigger deal of this recession than what it is. Most people are still employed. If people would stop fear-mongering then people wouldn't be afraid to go out and buy stuff.
Suddenly, last week, he changed his tune. He was told to lay off 8 people in his division. All friends he's worked with for many years.
Now he's scared.
My nephew manages a local Goodwill Store. Or as we have come to call it-- "The GW Boutique"
He said donations are way down. People are trying to sell stuff rather than donate. This weekend, his store had no furniture for sale. NONE! They have a whole section for just furniture and usually half of it is sitting outside do to lack of room.
While shopping at GW this weekend I watched shoppers and even talked to a few. One lady was wearing a fur-- and it was real. A couple people I chatted with are employed middleclass but they told me they have quit buying overpriced designer clothes at the name-brand stores.
From what I saw last time at the mall, the only name brand store shoppers were teens.
In some ways people are ‘Getting It;’ in other ways they still appear clueless.
The near-empty stores are a blessing! Lately, in Home Depot I have had no problem finding some knowledgable help in answering my questions about the home-projects that I am working on.
A year or so ago,you could never find anybody to help you in one of these stores; now the employees are falling over themselves to assist customers – it must make their monotonous workday pass by faster.
On the other hand, despite gas prices creeping up, there is no shortage of Hummers, SUV’s and huge pickup trucks on the road.
-Mammoth
A very insightful comment, everyone still going to the malls...but buying NOTHING. I was with my wife at a mall this weekend, and there were a lot of people milling around, a lot of cars in the lot. Then I looked at everyones hands. NO shopping bags. I think I saw just a couple of bags everywhere I went.
Its sad really. Like ghosts haunting where they used to live, because they just don't know how to move on.
Noodles-
Ha I told this story about 2 weeks before XMAS...Went to do some GF shopping and as I walked through the mall I remembered this blog and looked around since the mall was PACKED!
I said well maybe I am being a Chicken Little?...BUT WAIT...Of the possibly 60-90 people in front of me I was the only one with a visible shopping bag!
2 weeks before XMAS! This will not bode well.
Get ready people...None of us will go unscathe...None of us is that well prepared for what will come...It's just a matter of how semi-comfortable we get by while standards of living plummet.
"Like ghosts haunting where they used to live, because they just don't know how to move on."
That's my wife--- Our income has plunged to half of what it was two years ago. But she still feels the need to make the weekly foray to the stores for "essentials". Only now, she comes home with a couple of dollars worth of things instead of $50 worth of stuff.
My cisco voice networking contract ended early February. Now i'm studying to move up the ladder.
To the person bashing the Boomers:
Let's see what your lazy-ass, living-off-your-parents generation coughs up.
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