Last night, with an open LL Bean catalog on my desk, I went to the website to order a flannel shirt for Jonah. Jonah said that he wanted one for Christmas. My kid wants clothes for Christmas? The kid who once wore Ian's pants to school for the day and never noticed that they ended half way up his calf? Oh, kid, stop growing up!
So, I went to the LL Bean website and looked for flannel shirts with the fleece lining. While I was there, I figured that I would get Steve one, too. Everything was sold out. At Lands End, the pickins were slim, too.
Does that mean that people are shopping a lot or businesses are keeping their inventories low?
In the midst of the usual insanity of December, I've been getting quotes on doing some small projects around the house. This morning, the asbestos removers are scheduled to show up. They are supposed to don space suits and pull the nasty stuff off the pipes in the basement.
We also need to deal with the leaky tub in the bathroom. The bathroom is a big mess for two reasons. One, we only have one full bath in this house. If that bathroom is out of service, then I'm going to be showering at the gym for a month. Two, in these old homes, they used to pour cement in the floor boards under bathrooms. In order to fix the tub, they have do a major demo job of the floor and pull out all that 100 year old cement and layers of tile. Hopefully, when the pull out the cement, a big chunk won't fall through the ceiling in the new kitchen. It's a huge mess.
I've been calling in contractors to give us quotes on the bathroom mess.
I love talking to contractors. They are full of gossip about business and people. They are the miner's canary for the economy. I like them better than Bloomberg for telling me when things are going to pick up.
They didn't have much good news for me. One guy said that he knew a year ahead of time that the housing bubble was going to burst. He said that he saw young couples putting in expensive additions on their homes. The money was too easy. So, he started socking away money back then, and he was glad that he did, because he's been living off savings for the past few years. He said that a lot of his competition went out of business and that he no longer turns away any job, no matter how small. He wasn't seeing any increase in business, though he thought that things might get better in February or March after Wall Street got their bonuses.
The quotes that I'm getting for the bathroom mess are a good 10 grand cheaper than quotes that we got five years ago. So, my procrastination is finally paying off. Score! The real estate agent told us to do the cheapest possible job on the bathroom, because we wouldn't recoup any of the expenses if we sold the house today. Fixing the tub was necessary to sell the house, but a new bathroom would be waste in this economy.
The asbestos dudes are downstairs right now. I can hear thumps and guys arguing in Russian. The first of three boring, long-ignored home repair projects is being crossed off the list. In addition to clean air and a working tub, I've accumulated some anecdotes and sad tales.
Apt. 11d 
I finally signed up for Landsend’s email bulletins this year and this Christmas season they have been really needy and desperate. I was getting one email every day for a while with offers like free shipping and 30% off. Unfortunately for them, now that I am conditioned to see that kind of offer, I’m much less likely to pay full price. Our school does uniforms through Landsend, so we might as well put Landsend on autodraft. This email barrage may be their normal Christmas thing, but it seems to me that it amounts to a sort of stealth deflation that allows them to keep their official prices at the normal level while letting the actual prices drift toward a market-clearing level.
In other microeconomic news, my relatives are moving ahead with their big construction project. Materials are less expensive now and the county permit people are much easier to deal with now that there are so few projects. On the other hand, it’s a tourist business, so there’s a certain amount of risk involved. In a downturn (2002-2003 was very bad), travel is the first things to go.
My younger relative the architect/structural engineer has been out of work about 2 years now, with some truck driving and some work on the big family project. I think the recession has been hardest on younger people. Another relative (a young commercial pilot) is between jobs right now (but hopefully very close to a new one). A third relative has a good job, but thanks to a husband who left her (and is getting laid off very soon), she has a huge house with a huge mortgage (nearly twice as much as it’s worth now) and no hope of keeping it going by herself.
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I just got my Lands End order. Maybe it is the weather that is moving the merchandise for them. I said to myself that if the first part of December is this bad, I’m not facing January and February without more warm stuff.
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I’m tracking high-end-ish stuff disappearing from local supermarkets. No more Haagen Dazs, no more Perrier, no more Bell and Evans chicken…
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Well, according to Fashion Incubator, cotton prices are rising alarmingly–she even recommends buying up at least one year’s worth of jeans, t-shirts, and underwear now, before the higher prices hit. I bought a truckload of Lands End cotton t-shirts (when they had an unusually good coupon-I think it was $100 off an order of $250 or more), I got enough of my usual undies from Jockey, and I’m searching for some jeans. I wonder if other people are also doing that–the deals are so good, why not stock up?
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I’ve been following your blog for awhile (I’m a woman poli sci prof) and your post on contractors and what they know about the economy would make a wonderful op-ed. You should think of writing it up as one and submitting to various newspapers. It would be a nice sort of slow news day, end of the year wrap up reflection on the economy — and I bet you’d be able to place it for publication. Best of luck!
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Thanks, loluisa. I might do that.
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We’re also doing a lot of expensive but boring fix ups to our house. Radon mitigation, some roof repairs, and next up: some window issues. Pretty soon we will have literally repaired or replaced everying in our house (built in 1957) except for the driveway. We’ve done electrical, furnace, water heater, lighting,plumbing. I told my husband that every dollar we put in is another year we have to stay in the house to make it worth it–so I guess we’re never moving!
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The beautiful thing about radom mitigation is that not bothering the seal up the house very well also works. I’m not half-assed, I’m concerned about radon.
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In the city, the restaurants are crowded, but the stores not so much. I think people are optimistic about continued employment (so they go out to dinner), but they can’t splurge (at Saks or Paul Stuart) until they actually get bonuses.
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After being at Ikea yesterday where seriously, I have never seen so many people buying so much in one place It certainly didn’t feel like a recession. I mean, I guess it’s Ikea and it’s cheap, but seriously, it was insane.
Also, the house flippers are back big time in my “up and coming” LA neighborhood. I have no idea what that means but undervalued foreclosures are being snapped up, remodeled with a very specific moneyed hipster aesthetic(the new breed are all pro’s, not an amateur game anymore since you need cash, not credit to accomplish it) and sold quickly. I’m not sure what to make of it.
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“Also, the house flippers are back big time . . . .”
Also looks like flippers are coming back in my Pacific NW city. And, as you say, a more professional breed doing what looks like more significant work (though since I’m the one who doesn’t know how to hang pictures on walls, I’m not a good judge).
But, Ikea, well, we’ve discovered that going to Ikea in the months of Nov or Dec drives us mad.
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…but they can’t splurge (at Saks or Paul Stuart) until they actually get bonuses.
When the revolution comes, Paul Stuart would be the first up against the wall if anybody knew who he was. On the other hand, the women who work at our local Saks annoy me. I may be poorer than their average shopper, but I’ve got more money than they do. I think it may be kept open as part of a corporate discipline program (“If you can’t be more aloof, I’ll send you somewhere so tasteless you can’t help but be condescending”).
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I’ve been to the mall twice in the past week. I hope not to go again. It’s like the first snowstorm of the year. Every driver forgets lessons learned over years of driving. Common courtesy goes out the window, especially when trying to find a parking space.
The parking lot was full. People were in the restaurants. The Apple Store was hopping. I didn’t see shoppers going wild in the rest of the mall, though. There weren’t streams of shoppers coming out loaded down with shopping bags. It looked like people were comparing prices, and buying specific items.
Barnes & Noble was doing a good business.
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My sister just told me that the house behind her (in Nassau County NY), which sold for $540K 2 years ago, is now on the market for … $319K. This Nassau County. A HS friend of ours (living in Nassau Cty now) posted this morning that he wants to see taxes cut more. I reminded him of the fiscal crisis in Nassau and told him his house value would plummet and his 9 mo old daughter would end up going to crappy schools and everyone on LI would move to Massachusetts and my house value would go up. 🙂
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Wendy,
You want your house value to go up?
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I’d want to be able to sell it for more than I paid for it, no?
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Wendy, we’ve been in our house since 85, and plan to be carried out of it in boxes. So every notional increase in its value is just a mechanism by which the county can extract more taxes from us. We dread any increase in assessed valuation. It’s not that we want to wriggle out of paying our fair share, but we don’t want to pay more than that.
As well, as prices have risen, when the houses do turn over, our new neighbor stream has shifted from raffish-and-fun to just-made-partner. And where are R&F people going to find places to live now, answer me that?
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I’m raffish and fun! Or maybe the R&F people will move to Long Island and buy houses from the current morons who voted in Mangano.
We’re in a starter home that we will need to move out of in the next few years. Also, here in Massachusetts, we have a provision that prevents the state from raising property taxes too much at a time. My current property taxes are reasonable.
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“I’d want to be able to sell it for more than I paid for it, no?”
If you managed to live there for 50 years, how much would it matter to you if the house lost much of its sale value? A house just shouldn’t be that big a chunk of someone’s net worth since you don’t benefit from the value until you sell it and you have to live somewhere. Of course, “somewhere” may be a nursing home, in which case you’d be glad of the money, but the fact that housing is expensive locally will probably drive up nursing home costs, so it might be a wash.
While homeownership does provide protection from inflation and rapacious landlords, I can’t even imagine what it’s like living in one of the godforsaken parts of the country where everybody is paying $1,000 a month in property taxes, which elsewhere might be the rent for a tolerable 3BR home. No local government can possibly be worth that much.
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My property taxes are *way* less than $1000 per month! I suspect the people who are paying $1000 per month in property taxes are the kinds of people who can afford to pay mortgages of several thousands dollars a month. Even in Westchester, NY, (home of the Clintons, for example) property taxes on average aren’t $1K a month. They’re $8K a year. And as Laura’s situation demonstrates, you really can’t put a price tag on being near family.
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Wendy, we’ve been in our house since 85, and plan to be carried out of it in boxes.
Don’t let them put you in the back of the truck.
I suspect the people who are paying $1000 per month in property taxes are the kinds of people who can afford to pay mortgages of several thousands dollars a month.
You’d only need a $400,000 house to hit $1,000 a month in property taxes here. In the small town down the street, you’d only need a $200,000 house to hit $1,000/month in property taxes.
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In the past week in this area, three people have been shot (dead) while trying to attack somebody. I suppose you could be all, “Go NRA, it’s your birthday,” except that in two of the cases the robber was shot with his own gun. My point is that maybe the crappy economy is pushing people into a life a crime even thought they suck at crime.
Against my point is that Pittsburgh’s economy has taken a smaller than average hit and one of the shootings was more of a “you stay away from my ex” kind of thing.
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“My point is that maybe the crappy economy is pushing people into a life a crime even thought they suck at crime.”
Isn’t that generally true, though? It’s mainly in the movies that sauve, debonair super-criminals go into armed robbery. If you really were that dependable and detail-oriented, you’d become a CPA.
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