When I was a kid gasoline was 27¢ a gallon. The average take home pay was about $200.00 a week. This meant you spent a small fraction to fill up your car and to eat. You bought groceries for about $30.00 a week. This left a decent amount of discretionary income. State colleges were affordable for all and every kid was basically headed off upstate to school. Things weren’t great but they were doable. Now it’s a new depression and a new economy. Three cars in a family means $150.00 a week on gas and $250 to $300 on food plus $2500 a month on mortgage doesn’t give you really any disposable income. Things are only going to get worse. Used to be you went to college got a job bought a house and went forward. Now they’re taking about laying off tenured teachers. And the ones that are left behind are content just to have a job. Nobody is reaching further than they can for fear of losing a limb in the process.
This is why the Web is so important. With storage and bandwidth costs dropping the only way to make a decent living today except for AIG is to use the Web to sell products. I just went grocery shopping and the deals were tremendous. Everything was 2 for $5 or 5 for $5. this is called deflation where the price you pay is close to the cost. A different kind of problem because it will kill the economy of brick and mortar. Even though web sales are growing they are not growing fast enough to keep up with the decline of buying and selling in the B&M world. We are in a time of major transition and we are going to feel it for a while. Thank goodness we have a new administration in place that is at least using a Blackberry to keep up.
We suffered for eight years and it hasn’t left us in a good place. We need venture capital to lead the way. We need risk takers to lead the way. And everyone is too scared to take a chance. We have to realize that if we want 27¢ gallon pricing then we need to make $4000 a week take home. And a regular 9 to 5 isn’t going to cut it anymore.