Bad News, but I get to have Parents-on-the-Street

Pam and I have been watch­ing with hor­ror as the state of the US econ­omy just keeps get­ting worse and worse. While things here are nowhere as bad, still, there have been some lay­offs (notably about 560 jobs by Can­West, the Cana­dian media com­pany), and an old retail and music fix­ture in Van­cou­ver called A&B Sound, where Pam and I got our first flat-screen TV a cou­ple of years ago, has gone belly-up, the reports from the tele­vi­sion and radio net­works in the states are about as bad as I’ve ever heard. They are describ­ing every­thing except depression-era soup lines, but I can even imag­ine that soon, if things con­tinue the way they are going.

So it was with a lit­tle bit of sur­prise that I got an email from my father, that was a link to an NPR report by Jim Zarroli that echoed some of the worst of the news. What more could he add to the reports of woe? Why was he alert­ing me to this?  It turns out that he and my mother both hap­pened to be in down­town Man­hat­tan when NPR had one of those ‘Man on the Street’ reporters try­ing to get the pulse of the shop­ping dis­trict. So, if the news isn’t too much of a bum­mer, at least I get to hear them on the radio, albeit via the Internet:

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So the sky is falling, but at Lord and Tay­lor in NYC, they are hand­ing out sale coupons. Good to know.