Subscribe to this BlogWeird stories of our hard times
Three signs of our hard times, in order of ascending weirdness:
1) Dollar stores are doing top dollar business. In Newsweek, Daniel Gross looks at buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts' one big success (amidst a bevy of big failures) over the past year: its $7.3 billion investment in Dollar General, up a smart 30.8 percent since KKR purchased the bargain-bin company in July 2007. (Other dollar store chains are also doing well, but not quite as well as this.) Why? Gross explains: "Rather than simply pile up cheap bottles of detergents and ultra-cheap clothes — truth be told, only about 30 percent of the items it stocks retail for less than a buck — Dollar General … tried to remodel the bargain basement into a condensed version of Wal-Mart—tightly run, more convenient, less overwhelming." It doesn't hurt that Dollar Stores are still meccas for ironic hipsters who love displaying their latest finds — or even reworking dollar store junk into marginally less-junky crafts. (See here and here.)
2) Coffee, tea, or free? Struggling British Airways is asking its employees to work up to a month for nothing. As CNN reports, "In an e-mail to all its staff, the airline offered workers between one and four weeks of unpaid leave — but with the option to work during this period." A month!? I'm not sure even Office Space's evil boss Bill Lumbergh would have had the chutzpah to ask for that.
3) Rental home hostages. CNN's Ed Lavandera reports on a strange and disturbing result of the housing bust: In Phoenix, Arizona, smugglers of illegal immigrants frequently hold these immigrants hostage until they agree to pay far more than they had originally agreed to to be ferried across the border. Making the kidnappers' jobs much easier: the glut of rental houses on the market because their owners can't sell them. There were an estimated 370 kidnappings in Phoenix last year, Lavandera reports, which means hundreds of hostages in some 80 "drop houses," many in middle-class neighborhoods. This one's worth watching.
Sorry, to say but most American people do not have the education or skills to be working in these "Jobs" that Indians are taking which are usually scientific and hi tech related fields. I am sorry to say most American youth are not studying these fields and the foreigners are capitalizing on my generation's mistakes. Take it from me I go just graduated Georgia Tech(Luckily with a job) and peers from my high school did not study in fields of engineering or computer science. But the foreigners are studying these field s in our universities and they are motivated.
Unemployment numbers do not count self employed people whose businesses have stopped dead. We are unemployed without the benefit of unemployment insurance. In fact we didn't get a rebate check last year because our business showed a loss. The idea of the stimulous checks was to get people to spend it. Wouldn't it be likely that we would have spent it?! Not only are we not counted anywhere but we're drying up and will blow away with the wind!
What is wrong with America is the WTO,NAFTA and GATT. Why can companies bring in people from India under an L-1 visa to do work at a fraction of the cost that was done by American's before? "Free Trade" is nothing but labor arbitrage… "Free Trade" is nothing but lowering our wages.
I hate to say it, but Ross Perot was right.
Unemployment statistics age like fine wine, designed by the government to improve by default. Everyone moving along the unemployment conveyor belt whose unemployment expires, drops off the conveyor into the shredder, counted in statistics as magically reemployed. When we reach 50% real unemployment, most peoples benefits will have expired, and the reported figure will drop to 5% or less.