Who Needs Yuppie Internet Scum? We Do, Pal, We Do
The discount shoppers were 15 deep at the Marshall’s checkout counter the other day, carts heaped with coats and Christmas dresses, only $29.95. The line moved slowly, and people chatted, as people will when they’re feeling fine. Someone mentioned how prosperous we all are these days. The salesclerk gritted her teeth and smiled.
Later, after the rush, she told a couple of stories. “There are people right now who have five and six layaways here at $500 each, and you know they’re not well off.” She sighed. “One woman came in here today, said she was a cosmetologist? Charged $3,000 worth of merchandise. Another one came in, asking me to put this on this credit card and that on that one because both cards are at their limits. I’m thinking: How can people afford this and not go broke?”
Good question. Not that it’s popular to ask it. Especially not at this end of the state. If some are sick of cigar-chomping baby golfers and dot-com you-name-it, no one could care less than your basic Southern Californian. It’s been a long, long haul from the beginning to the end of the Nineties here. Give us pashmina, baby. Give us leather pants.
And if we can’t afford those luxuries, then give us a cartload of nice discount dresses, bought on time with the measly 1% raise we’ll probably get again this year. Is this mood of wealth among the nonwealthy dangerous? Is this the dread “irrational exuberance” that economists warn of? Maybe. And yet, says the clerk, “Everybody else is spending money like crazy. You can’t blame people for wanting to go with the crowd.”
Last month--in a mini-foreshadowing of last week’s World Trade Organization class wars--a columnist in San Francisco openly suggested that “a good, strong recession” would be a real tonic for the Bay Area; that’s how sick he was of rich Silicon Valley showoffs up there. His mailbag ranneth over.
“Thank God, I’m not the only one who is refusing to sit back and watch my beloved Bay Area turn into one giant Ally McBeal episode,” cheered one reader. Another wrote bitterly of “Silicon smirks” from “gilded goons” and called for an “economic Chernobyl.”
The sentiment echoed stump speeches by Mayor Willie Brown, who worried that prosperity had backfired on San Francisco, clogging its streets with traffic and its neighborhoods with yuppie Internet scum. Parochial stuff. (What would the Bay Area do between meals if it couldn’t carp about crass arrivistes?) Still, it wasn’t the sole pocket of worry. The day after Thanksgiving dawned to department store picketers laying into big spenders. “Slow down ye frantic shoppers,” they caroled. Boycott that fur salon at Bloomies. Make this a “Buy Nothing Day.” Put down those leather pants.
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There are good reasons to be queasy about boom times, not the least being that--as observers of today’s anniversary of the Orange County bankruptcy declaration can attest--all booms inevitably go bust. Still, there’s also something off about wanting the boom to be over when multitudes still await their taste of the trickle-down.
Step, for example, into this random industrial park office in, oh, Fullerton--the office of Jack Sedaka, a basic Southern California guy. Sedaka has no IPO, no dot-com options. He’s just a 36-year-old dad in a shirt and tie with an ex-wife who lives down the street from him in his suburban hometown of La Habra. His two boys want a Foosball game for Christmas but he can’t quite afford one. His ex recently came within a hair’s breadth of being laid off--that’s right, this boom still has layoffs. Sedaka, a quality assurance manager for a sheet metal company, is still paying off his college loans.
He is asked what he thinks about this rooting for recession. It takes him a minute because he can’t imagine what kind of a nut would wish for such a thing. A scant eight years ago, he and his then-wife were spelling each other through his-and-hers defense industry layoffs. He spent eight godawful years job-hopping and going to night school. Only recently has he begun to believe that he might--just might--make real money someday.
“Do I feel wealthy? Not yet,” he muses, “but I actually think this boom is here to stay for the time being.” He nods toward the office corner, where cardboard boxes of parts bound for Germany are stacked as high as the filing cabinet. “This local economy is now a world economy.”
His smile is so hopeful that you--not quite but almost--forget to resent Internet moguls and callous global capitalists and the like. Yes, prosperity has issues, and they need to be addressed, but this is no time to declare that a bust would be better. Slow down, ye frantic recession-mongers, at least until the rest of us can wrest a piece of the action. What’s gone up will come down soon enough.
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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.
