A Voice of Sanity – RobertRinger.com

By Robert Ringer

Once or twice a year, my wife and I eat at Bonefish Grill, a chain restaurant that isn’t all that great, but they have a special way of fixing mussels that is excellent. For a couple of years after they opened, we could rarely get in because there was usually at least a two-hour wait.

That was then; this is now — on a Friday night at 8:00 pm, prime time for restaurants. The place was only half-full and we got seated immediately. I scanned the room to study the patrons. Noticeably absent were the APFs (Artificial-Prosperity Folks).

You can easily spot them, because when they go out to eat they wear the team uniform — sandals, Bermuda shorts, and a T-shirt. The APFs have begun to abandon places like Bonefish Grill and Red Lobster in favor of such depression-priced eateries as McDonald’s and Burger King. When we left Bonefish Grill around 9:00 pm, it was 90 percent empty. Not good. The times they are a changin’.

As I discussed in some detail in Part III of my article “Can Inflation and Deflation Coexist?” (December 19, 2008), restaurants whose business models are based on the nonstop false-prosperity of the masses are headed for trouble.

Among others, I mentioned the big three: The Cheesecake Factory, P.F. Chang’s, and California Pizza Kitchen. These — along with medium-priced steakhouses such as Outback and Longhorn — are the poor man’s gourmet restaurants.

Then, on Sunday night, we treated ourselves to one of our favorite meals at Five Guys, a Washington-based hamburger chain. Best burgers and fries in the D.C. area — and they come with a guarantee to kill you if you eat them at least once a week for a year. With each giant bite of a Five Guys burger, pure cholesterol squirts out of your ears. Kinky … kind of makes you feel like Homer Simpson.

While I was vacuuming in my fried-in-peanut-oil burger, the manager came over and chatted with us. I asked him if the depression was hurting sales, and, not to my surprise, he said that his sales were actually up last month.

The reason I was not surprised is because now that the Obama Depression is worsening, many of the ex-patrons of these restaurants have only two choices: Eat at home or eat at fast-food places. For years I’ve said that when the decades-long invisible depression finally starts to become visible, the KFCs and Taco Bells (and, of course, Five Guys) would continue to do well.

But Sam’s Club and Costco should do even better, with people buying large quantities of staples and hunkering down for a long winter’s night. When I say long, what I have in mind is something along the lines of, say, the Dark Ages.

Of course, whether the depression lasts ten years or a hundred years depends upon many factors. Will the Duplicitous Despot succeed in implementing his Saul Alinsky plan to establish an eat-the-rich dictatorship, or will enough congressmen and congresswomen in his own party so fear being booted out of office that they will turn on him?

Or will a savior step up to the plate — perhaps a Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin, Ron Paul, or Wayne Allyn Root? And will such a savior have the guts to firmly grip the U.S. Titanic’s steering wheel and guide the ship of state away from the Spending Iceberg that the progressives are now trying to crash into?

But I digress … back to our discussion with the manager at Five Guys. We were sitting next to a window that looked out on a row of stores across the street in the same mall. One was the Ritz Camera store that we used to take our film to. It had closed its doors about a month ago, after the parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. All told, Ritz has closed, or will close, about 300 stores. Now that’s what you call change.

The Five Guys manager told us that, surprisingly, the Gym Source, directly across the street, is still selling a couple of exercise machines a day and managing to cover its overhead. Its sales pitch to prospective customers is that having your own equipment at home is a lot cheaper than paying health-club dues. All well and good, but how long will that logic ring true with people who are focused more on how to pay their rent than on six-pack abs?

It was only 6:00 pm, and Art & Frame, Cork & Fork, Bella Diamonds, and The Running Store were all closed for the day. The manager said he had watched them move their closing times from 8:00 pm to 7:00 pm, then from 7:00 pm to 6:00 pm, to cut back on payroll costs.

Then there was Cold Stone Creamery — one of my most unfavorite retailers — at the end of the street. Cold Stone is a classic shtick company, with yet another business model based on the assumption that the false prosperity of the masses would last forever.

At Cold Stone, you pay a king’s ransom for a dip of ice cream, the shtick being that you get to watch some skuzzy kid toss the ice cream around on a marble slab, smash it, chop it, let loose strands of his hair drop into it — then scoop it together in a way that makes both the customer and him believe that he’s done something magical to it.

Companies built on shtick — aimed at trying to quench the gluttonous desires of false-prosperity addicts — are all destined to become extinct. That is, unless they change their business models.

As my wife and I drove out of the center, I noted the number of empty stores for rent. Along with many who are far more knowledgeable about commercial real estate than I am, I long ago predicted ghost-town shopping centers and strip malls in our future.

But it’s happening quicker than I thought it would, and if those in the government who hate prosperity get their way, empty stores soon will be an accepted part of the American landscape. To our kids and grandkids — growing up with wind farms and solar panels all around them — it will seem perfectly normal.

Forget the financial pages. Above all, forget what you hear on television — especially from politicians. If you want to know what’s going on with the economy, check out your local restaurants and retail stores. Visit strip centers and shopping malls and count the vacancy signs. Drive around and look at the For Sale signs in nearby neighborhoods. Then use — you guessed it — your common sense.

You may even want to buy Common Sense, written by an ex-alcoholic entrepreneur who has more of that commodity in his little finger than all of Congress combined. And, to boot, he has remarkable self-discipline. The fact that he has resisted the temptation to smash his little dashboard Obama doll against his forehead is quite impressive. I admire people who can remain calm under trying circumstances.

_______________________________________

Liberty Education Interview Series

Please encourage your family, friends, and coworkers to listen to the Liberty Education Interview Series. Liberty needs all the support it can get right now.

_______________________________________

To comment on “The Emergence of Ghost Centers”, please login below.