Remember back in the day, waaaay back in the 80’s and before? When you went shopping for something special like a piece of furniture, a new dress, a home decorative item and didn’t usually find it on your first trip? You sometimes spent weeks, and depending on what you were looking for, maybe even months scouring Kmart, the mall (notice I didn’t say malls), Sears catalog, perhaps a couple local boutiques, until you finally found what you had in mind. No Bed, Bath & Beyond, no Crate & Barrel, no IKEA, no Express or Ann Taylor or Talbot’s within a 20 minute drive or a click away on your laptop.
Maybe my memory is a little off having grown up in a town that STILL doesn’t have a full-blown Gap, but I was reminded of these days while walking downtown Cincinnati tonight and noticing the different merchants that have shops down here. Rather than get in my car and drive to the wine store and pizza place (now you know what I’m having for dinner tonight!), I decided to take a walk and get these things from my neighborhood. As I was passing an antique Persian rug dealer, I caught myself thinking, “Cool! I never knew I could get an antique Persian rug within a mile of my place!” Mental note for when I have an extra five or six grand I think would be best spent on something people walk on and my cats sleep on…
Later in my walk, pizza in hand, wine in my backpack, I passed a deluxe fabric shop and thought, “Really? You mean if I had the means and desire to re-cover my Value City Furniture couch, I could just walk down the street and pick out a pattern?” And I realized I could probably survive living downtown Cincinnati without a car if I really had to, although the variety of choices would be severely limited. Kind of like back when I was a kid and sometimes had to settle for what was available at The Little Red Shoe House because there simply weren’t any other stores in Traverse City that carried narrow shoes for toothpick skinny 9-year olds! And that got me started on the train of thought… maybe that’s where we are heading now with the contraction of our economy.
The S&P 500 index, which is in my opinion the best measure of the stock market in general, closed today at levels we haven’t seen since October, 1996. What were you doing 12 ½ years ago? What was life like? Egads, how things have changed for me! I was a brainy freshman at the fine institution that paid for my education, Western Michigan University, struggling to ace my honors Chemistry class, teaching my pre-calc teacher how to teach trigonometry, and skating by in my engineering drafting class since I couldn’t have cared less how to draft for engineers. I spent Tuesday and Thursday evenings rehearsing with the vocal jazz group I was lucky to audition into (which helps explain why I DON’T know that Seinfeld episode that every situation reminds you of), I didn’t have a car (my ’87 Ford Tempo, ‘Shirley Tempo,’ was being subjected to the whims of my still-lead-footed little brother back home), and shelling out $1.99 for an order of breadsticks at the Little Caesar’s in our Student Union was a true splurge. My, my, my what a difference 12 ½ years makes!
It’s hard to ignore the constant barrage of bad news right now. The Big D word is being thrown around more and more. No, not that D, this post is about the economy, not relationships! And we’re all beginning to wonder if Grandpa didn’t really have a point when he did the mental calculation of what a $175 pair of jeans would have cost back in the ‘40’s after the Great Depression. (for the record, that was $175 well-spent for what it does to my backside – MUCH better-spent than the fees I paid to PNC Bank for ONE record-keeping error!!!)
I find myself mourning the loss of stores like Linens’n Things and Circuit City. I mean, where am I supposed to go when Bed, Bath & Beyond, Target, Meijer and IKEA don’t have the perfect soap dispenser for my bathroom redecoration? Where do I turn for the latest flat-panel LCD tv when I don’t like the prices at Best Buy, Walmart or hh gregg?
So perhaps we’ve all become pretty spoiled over the past 20 or so years. Or maybe the past 50 or so years. I mean heck, as Americans we’ve been spoiled pretty much since the conclusion of the Revolutionary War when we gained the freedom to govern ourselves! Perhaps it is time to get back to basics.
There has been a nice undercurrent of thinkers and seekers lately pointing out that true happiness is probably not contingent on the size of your SUV (insert mental image of 105-pound soccer mom trying to back up her Excursion, almost needing a phone book to see out the rear-view), the square-footage of your home (how often are all four of those bathrooms REALLY in use anyway?), or the designer label on the sole of your shoes (while I can’t say from experience, don’t those Jimmy Choos do a number on your poor little piggies?). Deep down, we all know this. I mean, I confess to living in an apartment that is at least twice as spacious as I really need, and I DO own a pair of $175 jeans (did I mention how great my butt looks in them though?), but when I really sit down and think about my priorities and what I could and could not live without, I realize it’s probably not all bad in the long run.
Before you call me a Socialist, remember that I make my living by assisting individuals with maximizing their wealth by investing in the stock market. I’m not saying that we should all feel guilty for extracting pleasure from the material things in life. And I’m certainly not saying that consumerism is or should be dead! How will the stock price of Coach ever recover if the market for ridiculously expensive handbags bites the dust for good?
I suppose I’m just recognizing that there is a balance and that our society as a whole was probably leaning a little too far to the ‘gimme-gimme’ side of the scale. It might not be the blackest day in American history when an average citizen strikes out to buy a new lamp for the living room and
