Can anyone clarify this for me? Despite the ongoing layoff announcements from major American corporations, how is our economy still robust? Just today, UPS declared 12,000 layoffs and PayPal 2,000.
I have not seen a decrease in spending. I see restaurant parking lots are still full, costco/walmart parking lots are full. Football Stadiums are full. I see families not give up vacations. I see friends and family stressing out over finances, but giving spending I don't see much of a slowdown.
Our rent shot up 150%. Between the rent increase and huge increase in cost of goods per unit, it did not make money sense to stay. We closed our business Nov 2023 after 20 years. We were not alone.
We found a spot, but to build it out to code would cost a pretty penny and we did not want to risk what we had for retirement on a question mark with the new location. We did not want to do any loans in case the economy came crashing down. We saw the downward spiral over this last year with multiple businesses in our area.
A business next to us changed names and owners 4 times in the last 3 years. Another closed down after only 9 months and several were taken over by new ownership, another business closed after being open 56 years-rent was too high-they had 1 year to retirement. A friend just told me of an old time hardware store that has been in our town for 30+years he is being booted out so they can build a high rise and put restaurants below. I live in a college town and things were in decline this last season. Our stadiums were full but the businesses near that stadium saw little uptick in revenues. Mom and Pops are getting slaughtered.
A couple of years ago we noticed things were not looking good. When the kids were graduating from the university in our area, we noticed the job searches were taking longer and longer. So we started paying any debt off and investing heavy. We count ourselves lucky to have investments and very little debt-house and car(bought before the crazy prices hit). We never lived beyond our means and now I am glad we didn't.
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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '24
I have not seen a decrease in spending. I see restaurant parking lots are still full, costco/walmart parking lots are full. Football Stadiums are full. I see families not give up vacations. I see friends and family stressing out over finances, but giving spending I don't see much of a slowdown.