So, the stock market keeps pushing new highs. Evidently — according to the government — inflation is dropping, and the economy is doing quite well. Meanwhile, Bitcoin just reached a new all-time high, even if it has retraced a bit.

If any of that were anything to go by, everything should be fine and dandy, right?

But That Isn't Really True...

Yesterday, I watched the opening few minutes of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell's semi-annual testimony before the Senate Monetary Policy Committee... and was struck by the opening words by Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown... and felt somewhat "heard" in the sense that "the nation" rarely reflects the experience of the individual, dealing with life at street level.

Every now and then, I run errands for an elderly gentleman who's a friend of ours. Sometimes he needs taking to the doctor, sometimes I take his laundry to the laundromat, sometimes I buy groceries for him and sometimes I go with him to appointments at the physical therapist or the chiropractor.

Like most people nearing their '80s, he's on fixed income — that is to say, Social Security and some kind of retirement benefits. A long time ago, he was in the military, so he has a bit of a military pension as well.

Not long ago, February 18th, he needed me to go to the grocery store and buy him a few things. Which I gladly did. I went to his house on the way out and picked up a shopping list and an envelope of money and he declared "well, here's the last money I have this month, hopefully it's enough — I'm pretty sure it'll be enough."

So I went to the store and bought him a loaf of his favorite bread, five hot chicken strips, eight bottles of kombucha, and a box of donuts. Because these are the things he likes and he says he's "too old to worry" about whether or not what he's eating all the time will shorten his life a bit. Good for him!

But here's the point. That very short shopping list set him back $52.13 of the $60 in the envelope. And that has to make do for him till the end of the month. The rest of what he got for his retirement check has to go towards paying his rent, and I know his fuel bill is going to be hefty at the end of the month because we've had some really cold days. Again, this happened on the 18th of the month and he had no disposable income till the end of the month, which was 10 days away, February being a short month.

Intermission

While at our local supermarket, I noticed how the colony of rather dilapidated RVs and vans at the edge of the parking lot had grown into a small wheeled village.

There used to be just one RV more or less permanently parked out there, and pretty much everybody was okay with the cheerful 70-something lady who lived in it and borrows power with an extension cord from the lights at the adjacent small park.

Now the number of RVs and vans has grown to about eight or maybe ten, and I could see several tents pitched in the thicket in the park.

Like many small towns in our state we suffer from the problem that has been going for some time which is that the cost of property and rentals and the cost of living here has far outstripped people's ability to afford them.

Our town finds itself in the unenviable — but by no means unique — position of having a somewhat aging population, with the median income in our County ($30,174) being some 20+% below the state median ($37,656) while the median housing price is considerably above the state median, even considering sky-high Seattle properties in that mix. This has been an accident waiting to happen for a long time and we're increasingly starting to see the effects.

Some people are "fortunate" enough to be able to sell their house and use the proceeds to move away from here to some part of the country where property is cheaper and they can at least afford to live, even if it's not a place they actually want to live out their golden years.

But not everybody who is moving away is in the retirement bracket. Many are just regular working people who do things like work in the hospitality industry, or are retail clerks at local stores, bank tellers or working at the local port. One of the trends we increasingly see is more and more small stores are only open four days a week because they can't find staff to work there.

When I say "can't find staff," it effectively means that people working for retail wages can't afford to live here, and they can't afford gas for a 30-mile daily commute.

So many now keep a schedule by which they are only open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday to at least try to capture weekend business from visitors from out of town.

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, there's a good chance we might find their proprietors working as relief nurses and orderlies at the hospital, loaders at the paper mill or cashiers at the local Safeway.

Intermission

For the first couple of months this year — because it's property tax season and then it will be income tax season — I've been working particularly hard to get my online businesses to produce as much income as possible.

Much of what I do involves selling products both to collectors and to jewelry makers and artists. And it's something I've been doing for a couple of decades now, or basically since the earliest days of e-commerce.

The thing that alarms me a little bit is the fact that for the past 60 days I have probably put about 300-400 new items up for sale with a combined sales value close to $12,000. Yay, go me! The alarming part is the fact that a decade ago doing so would easily have generated $3,000-$4,000 in revenue. Fast forward to 2024 and in the first two months of 2024 the same amount of work and the same number of products has generated a scant three or four hundred dollars.

Meanwhile the venues I use — e-commerce sites like eBay and Etsy — charge more and more for their services so that those independent people who are trying to make a living as sellers are taking home less and less per transaction.

The latest deal they have going on is that you can pay extra to have "higher visibility." Which basically means you give up another 10% of your profits in order to be visible in search results, and the downside to that is that if you don't pay for that you'll now be drowned so far away in search results that nobody will find your merchandise and your sales will continue to deteriorate.

We might wonder "what the problem is," given that apparently the economy is so good and people have "plenty of money" because surely their stock market portfolios are bulging. But the reverse truth is that people also expect to get more and more for the same amount of money.

Part of that we can lay at the foot of a particular category of retail that I call "cheap crap from China" which — while not comparable to what I sell — nonetheless puts a dent in my world because people look at pictures with prices and have an expectation that they "should be able" to get the better quality stuff for the same price as the junk that falls apart.

Now we can debate whether it's a significant problem in real terms, and to be quite honest the problem might be tangibly small. But that's the thing about life: if you add enough "small problems" together they end up having a major impact on your existence.

You lose 5% in sales here, and 3% in sales due to that other thing, and another 4% in a different place and before you know it you're looking at that shrinking revenue and comparing it to your increasing expenses and realize you are subject to a whole set of metaphorical thumb screws you never thought you would be.

Which all brings to mind the question of whether we're ever going to stop pretending that things are okay when in fact they are not at all okay. I have my doubts. Reality stands and falls on us buying into a fantasy that doesn't actually exist, and wishing for great times ahead that have no realistic chance of happening... all while reminiscing about times in the past that also never happened.

Have I grown excessively jaded? Maybe I have, and maybe I just spend too much time looking at the reality of what actually is rather than fantasizing about the possibility of what might be experienced in a future somewhere down the road perhaps long after I'm dead.

As a wise person once said to me: "A lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math."

But how do we explain away the booming stock market and "the economy" and companies evidently enjoying record profits? SImple, really... "Record profits" have NOTHING to do with my ability to buy a loaf of bread...

Think about it...

For now, I'm mostly worried about scraping together 150 LEO for the next LPUD!

=^..=

Curator Cat, March 8th, 2024