I decided to venture out to the local Circuit City to check out where they at in their liquidation process. I wasn’t expecting too much in terms of the deals, but I wasn’t expecting how many people were there. I couldn’t even find a place to park! Most of the shoppers left empty handed which had confirmed my assumption that the deals early on were nothing great.
Recession? You could have fooled me!
I will say, it is starting to get to the point of ‘OK’ deals. I still wouldn’t purchase anything until I did a price check elsewhere. TVs were 25% off. Consoles and games were 30% off (the PlayStation 3 was $300 and there were loads left). Movies were also 30% off, but with $24.99 base DVD prices, I was less than impressed.
There were signs plastered everywhere saying they were continuing to bring in stock from the warehouses and to check back daily. I won’t be checking it out daily, but I may go back a few weeks to see what inventory is left for stereo receivers. My birthday is coming up 
.
After my stop at Circuit City, I went over to the local mall. Again, I couldn’t believe how many people were out shopping. I guess those early tax filers are really eager to spend their return. For a while I thought it was the day after Thanksgiving! Stores were packed in the mall, the food court was bustling and everyone was carrying bags of merchandise. Recession? Doesn’t seem like it.
In in way, this a great sign to see. Maybe the news of the senate finally reaching a tentative deal on the stimulus package have jump started consumers morale. Still, everyone needs to understand what we did before, won’t work in the future. We need to ween ourselves off credit and pay back our debt.
The numbers haven’t been pretty and I don’t expect a quick turnaround, even with the stimulus passing. One good thing, the weather is starting to turn out nice. It was a beautiful February day!
Stupidly Yours,
Matt
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
You hit the nail on the head, the CC’s got paid off with the tax return. Time to run them up again. We might be human, and able to learn from our mistakes, but this isn’t that big of a recession that everyone and their dogs have felt the cut back on food intake. We still have a 93% of people that had jobs, keeping them. 7.5% are unemployed? How many have been unemployed since they quit at BK or MacD’s? All I hear is about how the “Overly Rich” people saying they aren’t selling as many cheap, poorly made, low fuel quality, over priced cars. And they cant afford, but they can, their private jets or their union workers that get paid for sitting in the break room at $45/hr so they have to fire the working people on the line. Give me a break, recession, it is a scare tactic to help the rich supplement their income with gov bailout. Us normal Joe’s will receive a $7500 new home buyers tax credit, that is not why I bought a house, but I will have to pay it back. Will these Banks and Auto-crap makers pay back the money they were given? Will AIG payback the billions it got in over-payment for its assets back next WEEK and issue a statement saying they are sorry for taking a grossly amount of money for something that is worth only a 1/4 of what they got?
Lets be real here, capitalism has been turned into a mutli-head dictatorship of the financial world. I say world cause the oil industry is part of this problem as well, but they were smart and didn’t even try to say they were hurting after the past 2 years of record breaking income. Banks, Cars, Oil, with those 3 running the world, everything else will cost more. Banks gives our the bad loans to people so they can have the huge cars that consume a lot of gas. Then gas prices go up because no one wants to argue with them so people pay more to fill up the SUVs getting 7 mile/gallon. So to keep the cars, they default on their house payments, the banks take the hit and the house of cards come tumbling down. The American auto makers don’t want to change how they produce cars or anger the oil gods by making them more fuel efficient till it is an absolute must, so their sales dip. And now 2 of 3 are now looking for a handout.
We are people that make mistakes, the average Joe still wont know what they can and cant afford, but if a bank or car dealer-ship says you can have this car for this payment and we will know you can afford it(witch they don’t). The average Joe will agree and find himself in the same pitfall as before. But it should have been the car dealership or the bank to realize that it is not about how much they can make right now, it is weather or not Joe will be able to sustain the payments because they are PROFESSIONALs of money and Joe isn’t.