Just as you did, I heard and saw the virtual cheering as news outlets reported the latest job statistics.
Then again, you didn’t hear much, if anything, about the crisis facing Sears and the end of the line for another major chain, the 113-year-old Alco Stores.
If you believed the “bravos,” you’d think the economy is booming, that jobs are there for the taking and people are heading into the holiday season flush with security and money to fund it.
Well, not quite, although that’s what politicians want you to believe. Clearly, it’s to the advantage of Barack Obama for people to believe he’s turned things around and that the country is on the road to economic success.
That’s what he and the Democrats want you to believe as they tout the new figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They especially cheered the figure that 321,000 new jobs were created.
Of course, they didn’t specify what kind of jobs, what those salaries are and what future there is for those workers. Not surprising, the bulk of those jobs were entry-level, unskilled and minimum-pay positions. It’s nothing to cheer about and no help to mid-level and upper-level workers who are desperate for work.
What the pundits didn’t talk about are the latest figures that 92,487,000 Americans are not working and, for most of them, it isn’t a choice. Unemployment hangs at 5.8 percent, and the labor force participation is at a 36-year low.
That’s nothing to cheer about.
It’s one thing to look at the headlines and listen to the accepted newspeak, but it’s totally different when you look behind the scenes at what’s going on in Middle America and how the average American is suffering from an economy that’s slowly strangling them financially.
Most Americans are familiar with the national chains, Sears and J.C. Penney’s. Both are more than 100 years old and were started by actual people whose names we use but whose retail establishments today are nothing like the founders’ original intent.
Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck started Sears, Roebuck & Co in 1886 – serving a sparsely populated country. Because of that, and for decades, the Sears catalog, often three and four inches thick, sold everything and anything someone might want, regardless of where they lived.
The chain today is struggling because of the competitive retail market and because of the erratic economic conditions.
James Cash Penney started his stores in 1902, as the Golden Rule Stores. In 1913, they became the J.C. Penney chain. He believed in honesty and respect for the customer. He also became phenomenally successful, but as decades passed, the economy and different merchandising philosophies undermined the business.
In just the last three years, Penney’s realized upward of $3 billion in losses with management changes and store closings.
Sears announced a net loss of $296 million and anticipates closing more than 130 stores this year and another 200 next year.
Hidden in figures like that are the jobs lost and the loss of merchandise in the price range of low- and middle-income Americans.
An extraordinary example of the economic hit to Middle America is the news that the Alco Stores are bankrupt, and all of the stores are closing.
As a Californian, I’d never heard of Alco until family members moved to a small town in Arizona. The rural ranching community had a basic downtown with a Safeway and a local market, and an array of local merchants providing basic services. And, they had an Alco – a new-looking discount store that sold just about anything and anything you could want at terrific prices. I loved it.
I got the town newspaper last week and discovered the store is closing, everything is on sale and, in fact, the entire chain is going under.
The overall corporate reason is “the lingering economic slowdown.”
Funny isn’t it, that on the level of real life, the economic slowdown is an economic killer, but from Washington, we hear everything is rosy?
No, it isn’t.
The Alco chain is 113 years old, selling name-brand and private label products at discounts.
Seventy-eight percent of its stores are in towns without another major retailer and, in fact, many are serving a rural clientele on fixed or low incomes.
They have stores in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
No wonder D.C. and the media ignore the plight of such a business. It services fly-over country, so they don’t care.
Except that thousands of customers are disrupted, and more than 3,000 jobs are on the line. For those people in those small towns. there may not be another job for them to find. Losing Alco may be the difference between them and their next meal or new shoes for the kids.
Those people are the heart of America. They are the average, middle-class, working people of this country.
They’re the ones the politicians should focus on when they start lamenting the economic situation, and they should stop supporting bringing into this country thousands of unskilled, illiterate people who not only can’t earn an income to support themselves but who can’t support the businesses we need to keep the economy going.
Losing stores like Alco and Sears and Penney’s is losing part of our American heritage. It’s a tragedy especially because Washington doesn’t care.
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