American consumers have cut back their spending recently. The months of July and August saw a huge decrease in spending and the numbers for this month are supposed to be really low too. How cna we be blamed though for spending less. Gas prices were out of control over the summer. The article I read said that automobile prices were dropping, stores were seeing less customers, less people are flying and eating out at restaurants. A few of my friends actually got laid off because the stores they worked at went under with having no customers. I used to work as a photographer at a portrait studio. In recent months we had a huge drop in the number of people booking appointments to have pictures taken. My manager had to decrease the number of hours the studio was open because we couldn't afford to have it open as late anymore and also threaten to fire people if we didn't start making better sales and booking appointments. I went shopping for the first time in about a month or so this weekend. Every store I went into was having some sort of sale and a few of them had a person standing at the entrance with coupons that were only valid if I bought something that day. Maybe it was just my mall, but the whole place looked like it was going under, fast, real fast. The article also discussed that more people were buying food from grocery stores and eating at home instead of eating at restaurant. I bet they're not eating more organic though. I feel like we're going to see more and more businesses, stores and restaurants crash and burn. I have a good feeling Wal Mart will still prevail though.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/business/06econ.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp
No comments:
Post a Comment