About the Economy
By Art Gallagher
I’m convinced it’s not just me and my businesses.
Maybe it’s gasoline prices. Maybe its the weather. We’re not hearing about it yet in the mainstream media, but among Main Street businesses it seems like everyone is talking about it. In the last few weeks it’s as if a switch was flicked and economic activity was turned off.
I just got off the phone with a friend who has two businesses; a law firm and a retail store. The retail store should have done $50K in sales this weekend. It did $11K. Last month’s sales were off 25% from April of last year. The law firm is quiet. New clients don’t have cash for retainers and long term clients are falling behind on their bills.
Over the weekend my friends with restaurants and hotels were complaining about what a slow start they are having to the season.
Landscapers and contractors are not working because of the weather. They don’t have much of a back log anyway.
My friend with an auto repair shop and a lock smith business offered that there is a great deal of maintenance being deferred on cars, causing major breakdowns for some customers who are paying cash when they have to. There is more cash business than credit cards or checks, even for big tickets.
Hopefully it is just my circle of friends and the slow down we’re alarmed by is not a broader trend that will show up in monthly and quarterly government reports in the next few weeks.
At the GOP finance gala last week I needed change for a $100 bill. I was shocked by how little cash was in the room. I asked 10 or 15 people to break the bill before I found someone who could.
Does anyone have some good economic news to share? Please do so in the comments.
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This small business problem in NJ has to be solved. Maybe the voters will wake up when we are down to 3 Congressmen and 100% of the employed working for government?
I doubt they’d wake up then either, Gene.
I’ve been hammering at Joe Ferraina here in Long Branch for years, the latest scandal involving his name gives me a new opportunity to really make more people aware of the cost to employ the guy for the poor results out of our schools. But the facts are simple, Ferraina “got X a job” where X is someone’s kid, wife, husband, dad, mother, sister, whatever. The people in town love the guy, because he has access to their kids and the parents go to him for whatever they need. Ask a parent in town and the response is consistently one of two things, “we’re going to pay someone anyhow, may as well be Joe” or “it’s great that he got us that pre-school and all new schools, FREE!”. He’s generally loved in town, it’s mind boggling and seems impossible to change their perspective, regardless of the facts or presentation of those facts.
Not so different, I go after my local “Republican” folks (who claim to want less spending on one side of their mouth) over useless and bogus UEZ spending in town, but it turns out what they mean is they want less spending in other towns, more in their town; cut their UEZ funding? No way, I’m a jerk for suggesting such things.
I go after my local folks for not looking to reduce costs at the beaches or make better use of the revenue they have been piling up over the years. I get personally attacked for attacking the issue…. reason: the people I’m complaining to/calling out have a vested interested in public/government employment and higher spedning. One guy works for the NJT railroad for 29 years at a high 6 figure salary, plus gets vacation/sick time payouts and is just waiting out the year to retire and take a sweet pension deal. One works in the UEZ office and is the one wasting the money there. Then it’s who has kids in school, who is friends with who, who volunteers at the same charity, who volunteers at the local fire department with the other guy. They all have their little reasons why the government should keep spending more and more money, on themselves; in the end, they have a vested interest in government spending and don’t really want to see any spending cuts, despite what they say.
Folks like you and I who work in the private sector and have no personal vested interest in more government spending seem to be the minority, and as more people become unemployed from private work, we become an even smaller minority. Jen Beck just voted to give away $7.4m, while at the same time having good bills to fight double dipping and expose government authorities who might be wasting money. I’m torn, is she helping or hurting? She seems to be right 80% of the time, but that other 20% REALLY hurts, sometimes.
I’m not sure what it takes to “wake up” anyone — all my screaming and yelling has done is make the locals hate my guts for trying, or opposing their spending plans. My municipal taxes went up 4.1%, my fees to use the beach as an adult went up 28.5%, PLUS the local government added all new fees for youths to use the beach, tapping a whole new revenue source, PLUS the local government is adding new paid parking meters as another revenue source — because the 28.5% increase still wasn’t good enough – but nothing was cut, no departments, people, funding, etc.
… but I’m the problem for complaining that the city government spends $1.8M plus to let free people walk or sit on the beach and expecting my local “Republicans” to be talking and fighting this.
All that said — best I can confirm from the container shipping side of the economy is that container movements seem to be flat the past 2-3 months, but they seemed to be flat this time last year as well. Movements are still higher this year than the previous two years so it’s not a total loss. However, just because the containers are moving, doesn’t mean that companies aren’t just stuck with contracts to import/export goods and now have warehouses/stores full of goods that aren’t selling or aren’t taking a loss on production of exports.
I should do better math…. 40% increase, not 28….
Art, I would say mixed. The retail store I work in January was typically slow. Feb. and March were very good, but April was so-so.
The first two weeks of May were good, but as with the other businesses you mentioned last week was disappointingly slow.
This at a time when many of the products we sell are about to receive another price increase because of raw material shortages and gas prices.
To make things worse one of our sundry distributors just filed for Chapter 11, with its affiliate in NJ having to lay off some of its workforce.
[…] the MMM unscientific economic indicatorsare proving to be true. The horrible economic activity I wrote about two weeks ago is showing up […]