Here’s my own little economic survey. I flew to St. Louis Tuesday from LaGuardia on the only non-stop flight in the late afternoon, and the plane was half full. I stayed at the Ritz (corporate dictate) and they upgraded me to a junior suite and gave me a free bottle of wine with dinner. I took a client to lunch the next day at Mike Shannon’s, a classic St. Louis steak joint that’s been around for years, and they could have shut down half the dinning room and played a half court game of 5-on-5. That afternoon at the airport I was early and got a shoe-shine. The shoe-man had been at the same stand for 30 years and said he’d never seen it so dead as it had been the past few months. My flight home (again the only direct option) was less than a third full; I got all three seats in the emergency exit row to myself.These are not good signs. I can’t even remember the last flight I was on that wasn’t completely full, and I’m not one of those road warriors who belongs to all the travel rewards clubs and knows all the tricks; these were random perks.
Another troubling sign: the most direct path between my office and Grand Central takes me through Rockefeller Plaza every morning and evening, except for the period from roughly November 15 until January 15, when the crush of tourists visiting New York makes walking through the Plaza in the evenings impossible; I have to swing north and go cross-town on 51st Street over to Madison. But not this year. I’m still cutting through the Plaza because there are far fewer tourists – especially from abroad.
So it’s not just car sales and home prices that are down big. People are staying home in droves.
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