Reading The Economic Entrails
On scented candles, the Seventies, and my nervousness about macaroni and cheese.

I knew the 2008 crash was coming, when I realized that our local mall had three, scented candle stores.
I am not an economist or a market analyst. I’m a marginally- employed mother of two who must squeeze every dollar to the point where George Washington should press charges, but all those overpaid pundits, who claim to have been blindsided by the collapse of the housing market, should have smelled it coming.
Scented candles are a luxury good that can be purchased almost everywhere, for less, or lived without completely. They are not a product with, which one builds, a long-term, repeat, customer base. Corporations renting, outfitting, and staffing, high-priced retail locations, to peddle thirty-dollar candles, are probably doing it, on borrowed money, with insufficient oversight.
Nicely dressed professionals with better dental work, can blather on all day that fragrant wax emporiums are a crucial consumer partner in designing a complete home environment that speaks to all the senses etc., but if I’m burning one of their precious products when the lights go out, it’s because I found it at a yard sale for a quarter.
Three, overpriced, such establishments in the same suburban Texas mall, where I was living at the time, meant, too many bankers, were passing out too much low-interest loan money, without reading the attached business plans. The economy was clearly headed for collapse.
Primitive peoples often predicted the future by interpreting signs and omens from nature. Thicker coats on squirrels might point to a rough winter ahead, or deer stampeding suddenly, might signify an impending earthquake. Modern people aren’t different, our omens just loom up from different places. Joe Kennedy was allegedly spared the vicissitudes of the Great Crash of 1929, because he pulled his money from stocks, after his shoeshine boy gave him a stock tip. “When even shoeshine boys give you stock tips, it’s time to sell,” he said.
My own father would predict the quality of an unknown diner’s cuisine, based on a complicated equation, involving the height of the wait-staff’s hair, the ugliness of their shoes and the prevalence of taxidermy in the restaurant’s décor.
His rationale was that the wearing of ugly, but supportive and often expensive footwear, signaled a waitress’ professionalism and commitment to the job. Complicated coiffures demonstrated both a willingness to invest in one’s appearance and a higher level of discretionary income. (Weekly beauty parlor appointments aren’t cheap.) The taxidermy, spoke to non-corporate ownership of the restaurant as well as the owner’s sense of accomplishment, local pride, and financial success. (Taxidermy ain’t cheap either.) With all the right elements in place- a dedicated and well-rewarded staff working for a proud and successful, local pillar of the community, the food was bound to be first rate. He was never wrong.
Every day the mainstream news interrupts its coverage of Chateau Trump to report that the Dow is breaking records, it’s a great time to be in the housing market and employers can’t hire enough people to fill all their vacancies.
I look around and here in Kentucky, most of my friends are clinging by their fingernails. College-degreed or not, we’re unemployed, underemployed, prematurely retired and working enough side gigs and contract work to require a spreadsheet and a sheaf of Schedule C’s at tax time. Wages are stagnant, but rents are ridiculous, requiring our adult children to live with us years longer than anybody anticipated. Our cars are old. Our clothes are from Goodwill. We’re watering down the bean soup, but the national happy talk relentlessly chirps on as our newly elected leaders hack away at the little social safety net available. Who can you believe? Are we lazy? Unlucky? Obtuse? Unskilled?
Twenty-thousand people stood in the sun without food for as long as seven hours this past month to apply to work in an Amazon warehouse. I’ve worked for Amazon. Those warehouse jobs are low-paid, highly-physical labor in a rigid, high-pressure atmosphere, with few opportunities for advancement. As soon as you start, the company begins looking for reasons to fire you so they can continue to keep, the majority of their work force at starting wage levels. Why are people lining up for these jobs if the economy is so good? What’s the real story?
As we ask ourselves these questions ten years after the Great Recession, the same mango-pomegranate-pomelo, stench of that suburban mall is beginning to waft again through the zeitgeist, but it’s not coming from candles this time. Now the tchotchkes are talking.
My youngest daughter claims it started with a drinks tray. Last semester she took a course on seminal films of the 1970’s at the local community college. Half-asleep after an all-nighter spent scribbling about cinematic representations of “tarnished masculinity and the betrayal of the American Dream,” she agreed to go shopping with me.
T.J. Maxx inspired instant revelation. My daughter held up a gilded, faux bamboo, and acrylic tray and said, “This looks just like the Seventies.” It did.
Then she pointed to the Lucite chairs, the burnt-orange throw pillows and the sheepskin throw rugs of a nearby display. “Seventies. Seventies. Seventies,” she said. She was right.
And for the rest of our trip, she continued to notice Seventies visual references in the consumer goods at every outlet we visited, from the earth-tone ponchos at Charming Charlie’s to the faux-suede blazers at Stein Mart. “The Seventies are coming back,” my daughter intoned solemnly like a George R.R. Martin character delivering the long-term weather report. I could only shudder.
Being born a little late to enjoy the Seventies of Studio 54, Halston, and Ziggy Stardust, my experiences of the decade, revolve around cramming a family of six in an economy hatchback, because we could no longer afford the gas for our old station wagon and eating a lot of hamburger padded with soy extender. The whole era, in retrospect, seems to have been one long harvest- gold and pecan fog of non-stop penny-pinching, Herbal Essence shampoo and arguments about Watergate. Who would want to repeat that?
Too many people, it seems. The Dow hit 22,000 recently, but that same night, our local news report, looked like something straight out of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The weather lady wore a khaki A-line skirt and orange French tee. The national news reporter rocked a Diane von Furstenberg-style- wrap-jersey-knock-off and the anchor seemed to be in full Rhoda Morgenstern, lacking only a paisley headscarf and suede boots.
I tried to quell my rising unease by looking at the IKEA catalog that had just arrived, but the Swedes were no comfort. This year’s Råskog, the utility cart beloved by Pinterest , is Earth Shoe brown. The ubiquitous Gladom tray table is being offered in a dull mustard and a green finish that is nearly…dare I say it…Avocado? The exuberant Scandinavian prints I’d come to expect, had been replaced with smaller, more risk-averse, neutral graphics and dainty Laura Ashley florals. In fact, most of the offerings seemed to be smaller, plainer, and more portable. Is Ikea predicting an earth-toned future of forced relocation to smaller and smaller living spaces?
Storm clouds swelled on the horizon as I fled the house, seeking a vision of the future… and something to thaw for dinner.
The predictable, blandness of our local Wal-Mart renewed my contemplation of those long ago, irrelevant and overpriced candles. Stacked by the check-out was a display of Hostess Twinkies.
Hostess, in their quest to capture our snacking dollar, has expanded the variety of available flavors. In addition to the traditional yellow-sponge cake and vanilla filling variety, there are apparently now- banana Twinkies, cotton candy Twinkies, chocolate-filled Twinkies, Red, White & Blue Twinkies, chocolate-enrobed Twinkies, chocolate-cake Twinkies, strawberry crème Twinkies, blue raspberry Twinkies and chocolate -peanut-butter-filled Twinkies.
Charles de Gaulle once asked about France, “How do you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” He had it easy. Try governing a nation with ten kinds of Twinkies. And this is August. Pumpkin-spice and caramel apple offerings are sure to be just around the corner. Who are they trying to entice? Who eats these things anymore? The Boomers have largely given up junk food per doctor’s orders. The few shoppers with disposable income in these parts are drop-shipping their protein powder and kale chips from Amazon. Everyone in line with me was buying staples and not too many of those. Milk. Diapers. Cat food.
Then I spied the oracle, that had called me here. Displayed in the rack over the check-out belt, shone the Fall Collector’s Edition of Mac & Cheese magazine- a full-sized, full-color, full-priced(suggested retail $9.99), glossy periodical dedicated to recipes for macaroni and cheese. Somewhere a publisher defied all common sense and paid staff to compile, edit, photograph, publish and distribute an expensive tribute to a self-explanatory casserole. It’s macaroni…and cheese. One is hard-pressed to think of something more useless unless… it’s a thirty-dollar candle.
So, consider yourself warned. Somewhere bankers are dropping the ball…again. You heard it from me.
The seventies are coming back and they probably won’t be as much fun this time.