Sunday, March 29, 2009

Where's the Crisis?

I would've never guessed there was an economic crisis going on by viewing the scene yesterday. We drove to Woodbury Commons in New York to walk around and possibly buy something if the right deal came around. Really, we just went there because the weather didn't look good enough to go into Manhattan for the day--and we really wanted to go to a museum.

Woodbury Commons is the high-end shopper's paradise. It's a strip mall that is enormous--we walked around for four hours and didn't see everything there. There was not a single empty storefront--it was mostly luxury-brand outlets like Gucci, Calvin Klein, and Armani. It was pretty much everything that I couldn't afford even with huge discounts. But I'm not their target market.

Almost everyone walking around the shopping center--and there were hundreds of people packed in there--had bags from various shops. Quite a few of the people going around did not speak English--I overheard French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and German, as well as a few I couldn't identify. It was almost as crowded as walking through a shopping mall in China (without all the annoying staff shouting "Hulloooo!" at me).

I suppose this shows that the wealthy have nothing to worry about, and it's just the average folks who are getting screwed by the recession.

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