Balticon and the economy

[nancylebov]

I did fairly well at Balticon, and while I'm not complaining, I'm confused.

Speaking as an NPR junkie, all the news about the economy is at least somewhat scary, but people at Balticon were buying $30 and $50 at a time. And they weren't talking as though they were worried about money, and it was difficult for me to find help at $12/hour.

Some of you may believe that no matter how bad things get, a person can always afford a button. This is not how it works. If someone's low enough on money, they don't go to the convention or they go but they don't go into the dealer's room. I've seen a bad economy in the early 90s, and I had conventions where I could remember every 5 and 12 button sale because there'd only be a few in a weekend.

And it's not that the button business has no resemblance to the economy-- I can remember some years (in the 80s, I think) when my business exactly tracked the way the economy was described in the Wall Street Journal.

So anyway, what might have been happening? Is it that Baltimore is close to recession-proof DC? Is it that the recession hasn't hit ITish people? Is the population density high enough that money isn't sucked away by transportation costs? Nobody mentioned that they were spending their refund check, though that might have been part of what was going on.

One huckster told me that I needed to listen to both Fox and NPR to get some triangulation on the real world.

So, any theories? and what are you seeing personally about the economy?

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I'm seeing bad things happening in fuel and housing, but nothing that's threatening people's jobs any more than usual. As long as people have jobs and don't think they're about to lose them, they have money to spend.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

Pretty much everyone at my company is aware that the official policy is to send jobs offshore whenever possible. Nobody on my team of 10 expects to still be employed by this company in 2 years. It doesn't make for good morale.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Well, the job market is not awful yet, but it is uncertain and new people coming into the market are having trouble finding work. It's not just NPR. My own expreience fundraising confirms it, as do stats on food bank runs. But the population attending Balticon is probably not a cross section of the population at large. Some segments of the economy, such as healthcare workers, are doing very well. I think the tech sector never fully recovered from the decline post-2000, so it has not suffered as badly now.

I think people have just gotten more used to uncertainty. Typically, when people feel uncertain about their jobs (and we are dealing with more uncertainty than with job loss), they stop spending on non-essentials. But when uncertainty becomes the norm, people no longer let it impact spending.

You may also be dealing with the "blow out" mentality. If one scrimps and saves most of the time, but is "splurging" on Balticon, there is sometimes a tendancey to say 'Heck, this is my one vacation/treat for self/whatever, I should make the most of it.'"

[ckd]

Is it that the recession hasn't hit ITish people?

That'd be my guess. As an ITish person who recently started a new job, I will simply note that while checking my references my new company tried to recruit my former officemate before even getting to the part of the call where they asked about me....

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Likewise. Just started at a new job myself. IT hasn't hit its bad quarters yet, and only hindsight is consulted when hiring.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

My sense is that new graduates in my field (library science) are having more trouble finding jobs (though the market is competitive to begin with). Public librarianship and some academic positions are dependent on public funding, which is leaner than it was. One of my friends who works for the University of California saw her acquisitions budget cut by something like 50% this year. UC!

$MY_UNIVERSITY has lost a few people to better-paying positions, but that's not unusual because our pay scale is below average for academia.

My own spending habits haven't changed much. But I'm firmly ensconced in the middle class, income-wise. The impression I get is that it's mostly lower income levels that are being impacted, at least so far. I do know people who've cut back on driving, eating out, etc. So far, no one I know has lost a job.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

I should add that the local big state university just laid off 66 IT workers, but that's not just due to the economy.

[kallisti.livejournal.com]

Well, in the last 6 months - 12 months, Ottawa, Ontario has had 1,500+ Dell employees laid off, and about 1,500 Sitel employees, and they are saying that Convergsys is also thinking about closing....and that would be another 2,000 people. So the low-level ITish, phone center types have been hit hard. But those of us higher up the food chain in the IT business have not had the same level of job loss, but I know that HP has been slowly shedding jobs. I know that my current job is going poof! by the end of the year when they consolidate my servers with other servers in Colorado. I've been watching, and not seeing a lot of Unix SysAdmin type jobs around town...But that is just us here in Kanuckistan...:-)

ttyl

[demonspawnmom.livejournal.com]

From what I've seen, people tend to scrimp and save for cons. I don't see them as a real economic reflection of what's going on out in the mundane world.

[sethg]

All the indications that I've seen suggest that the recession is not going to impact geeks as much as other demographic groups.

Also, perhaps spending on buttons is countercyclical -- "I can't afford that $200 jacket that I've been salivating over, so I'll drop $30 on some buttons instead".

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Only up to a point. After that point, people start buying just a few buttons, or none.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I think it may be a combination of early days yet + people having saved up/using stimulus checks for their "vaction" + in groups not yet feeling the pinch badly.

My sister and brother-in-law were definitely noticing the cost of gas when they came to Kansas City from Phoenix last week to see my mother--but they're not yet in a position where this would stop them from making the trip. My brother--in-law was slightly annoyed when my nephew bragged on his car's gas mileage (41 MPG! Did I buy right or what!) but they weren't talking about not making such a long drive again any time soon.

So I think it's a combination of things, and the big slide hasn't happened yet, the way it did from '90-'93.

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Different places have gotten hammered to differing degrees at differing times... the ones that got hammered at the end of the Cold War and didn;t fully recover, were doing lots of hiring in 2000... and then the hammer hit again in 2001 in the tech world... and the employment level in Massachusetts hit a peak at the end of 2o00/start of 2001 that has it hasn't got back to. Instead, the job losses continued for a while, and it wasn't until not all that many months ago, that the employment figures started showing increases. Since wasn't in a fulltime job with benefits from the start of April 2002 until the end of 2006, I'm in a better economic state today than I was months ago.... and around here what happened was that companies hunkered down and stopped hiring, even ones that were profitable, back in 2001 and beyond, and stayed not hiring for many many many months in the USA thereafter--until recently, if a software business wanted to expand, the Financial Services Industry point of view was, "You don't get any investment money unless you offshore the work [note I wrote "offshore" and not "outsource"--outsource means the the company contracts the work out, offshore means the word gets done outside the USA--India had been popular for coding, but India's been offshoring to Eastern Europe where the wages are lower for a number of years now--IBM got ticked at an Indian company which IBM outsources and offshored to, because the Indian company then outsourced the work from IBM to another business, in Eastern Europe...

The fact that the typical Indian programmer a year or two ago on the average had a direct cost of 1/4 what a US programmer would cost and was one-sixth as productive didn't bother the Financial Services "experts" -- yes, that math comes up saying, before adding in the nasty overhead for time zone differences, sudden two week work stoppages, linguistic communications difficulties, that the programmer in India actually is 50% MORE expensive per line of usable code, than a programmer in the USA.... but what the Experts look at is the warm body count, not the productivity apparently, and the perception of costing less.

However, with the dollar doing a swan dive, offshore development and production might stop looking so apparently attractive.

Expensive gasoline makes travel more expensive, however, my commute to work is under four miles each way, and I have a small car which does not guzzle gas. Therefore, while the skyrocketing fuel cost (speculators... what's the word for kiting prices and such?) means going anywhere discretionary is something I'm thinking about a lot harder now than I was months ago, it's not something that's whacking me in the wallet going to and from work and such.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

For a lot of the economy, things have not been really right since late 1998. Yes, nearly *ten* years.

A lot of things went south in '98 but the problem was obscured by the dot-com bubble, which had just started to really inflate about then. Anyone who was really paying attention could see by 2000 that it was a bubble. God I wish I'd had 50 grand to invest in short-selling PSINet in March of 2000 -- I was telling everyone I knew that their stock price was way overinflated! ($50-plus per share in March of 2000, less than a dollar per share one year later.) So the bubble burst and times were tough, and then we got 9/11 which threw the airlines for a loop, and then we got Enron and other corporate accounting scandals, and so on and so on and so on.

However, with tough times being as protracted as they have been, the really bad effects got spread out over time, so it hasn't been as *acutely* bad as it could be. Now, I think we're looking at a repeat of the late Carter administration -- inflation starting to hit us while the jobs front remains stagnant. I don't see any massive job *losses* coming any time soon, but neither do I see much gains.

[cellio]

From what I've seen, seasoned techies are not generally in trouble yet. Fresh techies and people in other fields (particularly things seen as "soft", like the arts) are having some problems.

I don't go to a lot of cons any more, but when I do I'm not seeing the penny-pinching my friends and I engaged in 25 years ago, when we'd buy floor space for $10/night and work the con for reduced admission. More often, now, it seems that if people go to cons at all they just plunk down the membership and the hotel room (rarely more than 4 people, often fewer) and don't think much about it. Compared to that, a bunch of buttons or a stack of paperbacks is not so significant.

I wonder (and do not have enough data to speculate) whether the average con-goer is more affluent than, say, 20 years ago, and whether the less-affluent simply engage with fandom in different ways (such as through the internet). Note that I said average; I of course know of people who do cons on a shoestring. Just not as many as I think I should.

[chomiji]

Hey, hello! I stopped by on Saturday with my teenager, and we bought a stack of your buttons, as usual. My "golden handcuffs" DC tech-related job certainly still allows me to buy some buttons, if not a new Lexus or anything like that ... .

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Apropos of absolutely nothing, a very happy birthday to you.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday to you!

[landley.livejournal.com]

People are hopeful about the end of the Cheney administration, and anybody who can telecommute for an overseas firm (even potentially) has the price of their job bid up to match inflation.

And boy oh boy, have we had serious 1970's style inflation. Peak production's working just like OPEC oil embargo: gas at $4, electricity and heating oil up with it, and all transportation costs. Biofuels mean the price of wheat doubled, price of corn tripled, soybeans, grazing for cattle, you name it. House prices went way up too (they may be flat now, but they're not coming back down much)...

If your buttons haven't also tripled in price over the last 5 years, they're a relative bargain when driving to the convention can cost more than the admission...