As in recent years past, I ventured on out Black Friday.
This is usually not driven directly by any need that I have but rather by a desire to spend time with my family. As they like to go "hit the bargains" (as the kids say), so I too have learned to (slightly) embrace the day.
To be fair, if one is looking for something that one has already determined that one needs, it is not a bad time to go: for example, likely I could have gotten two years worth of shoes at a 30% discount (had I needed them). And I suspect that deals on commonly needed things like socks and underwear could be found at similarly amazing prices.
For the most part, there were no "crowds". Occasional lines, but nothing like the mass insanity that one used to see at Big Box stores for things like electronics (or maybe such mass hysteria still exists; I have no idea). People behaved well.
The most crowded place we went was one of the two malls in the greater New Home 2.0 area, one of what is likely my semi-annual visit to them. Much more crowded of course, although it seemed to me somewhat less full than last year.
The thing that surprises me as I go to such places, is how similar the sorts of stores are. We went shoe and clothes shopping - but there are just as many or more shoe and clothes shops in the mall that seem to market slightly different versions of the same thing. Non-specific clothing and fashion adjacent shops seem, to my eye, fewer and fewer.
This probably says something about us as a culture.
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On Saturday, with Na Clann safely returned to New Home, we ventured out into one of the "local neighborhoods" that our nearby urban metropolis has. This part of the neighborhood had a number of stores in it as well - very high end stores, judging from the cost of the chocolates and leather. It was a decent mix of clothing, fashion adjacent, non-fashion adjacent, and unusual stores (including a crystal store with a rather amazing collection of taxidermy).
I say "high end" because most of the places we stopped and looked had no prices on the actual items themselves. At least one of the chocolate bars The Ravishing Mrs. TB picked up was $45. A Cave Bear Jaw Bone, if you were curious, will run you about $5,000.
It was a very interesting slice of walking and looking, clearly not designed for someone like myself.
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Yesterday morning in church, the preaching pastor mentioned a survey a local church group had undertaken of the greater New Home 2.0 Urban Area. It was inclusive of a 25 mile radius around the main urban metropolis, and interviewed businesses, individuals, churches, etc. (or so I was told; I do not have the study on hand).
The shocking thing, both to the initiators and to myself: a full 50% of the people interviewed anticipated moving away in the next five years. At a local population of that area of almost 3,000,000, that is not an inconsiderable number.
Of course, not everyone that intends to move actually moves. But the reasons that people might move are apparent. Local big employers are closing up shop here, and the backfill is not going to be enough to replace those jobs. The urban metropolis of New Home 2.0 has all of the problems of almost any major urban center at this point, and even from our brief sojourn here, it is clear that nothing effective is being done. Add to that the cost of doing business here in terms of taxes both business and personal, and relocation begins to make some level of sense.
Sure, people will likely move in as well. But people moving in need to have jobs to come to, and those jobs - the so-called "good high paying ones" are moving to other locales.
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The trajectory of this is, of course, predictable. The people that are most likely to relocate are those who can relocate, whose job skills are such that they can find a job elsewhere or (like us) are still relatively unattached in terms of roots here. These are likely - but not always - the jobs that are the highest paying and thus, the ones that many of the businesses that we visited over the course of the weekend most dependent on.
With those paying consumers gone, the remaining consumers will likely not be shopping at the higher end stores (they never do). Tax receipts will fall, which then will need to be replenished (because no government body seems capable of cutting spending these days) by increasing taxes and fees. The urban issues, not solved now in days of relative affluency, will surely not be solved under those circumstances.
It does make me wonder what The Weekend After Thanksgiving Commercialism excursions will look like in the future.
