Retail Blues

If you're in the market for clothes or holiday presents, this should be a pretty good season.

Retail operators and industry analysts have been worrying about growing stocks of unsold inventory since last spring, and now the results are starting to show up in store performance numbers.

Macy's third-quarter report, released yesterday, said sales were down more than five percent from the same period last year. Its stock price dropped much more than that, suggesting that jitters are ricocheting through the broader industry.

The graph below shows the larger picture -- a steady increase in inventory (green) against a slower rise in sales (blue) for clothing stores, starting early this year.

The chart below tracks the broader group of all retail inventories over a longer period.  The worst years, 2009 and 2010, came after the Great Recession had clobbered consumer confidence.  Now the inventory level is ticking up again, a trend that that began late last year. 

Economists are puzzled for a couple reasons.  First, employment growth has seemed to be strong this year.  Second, energy prices, especially gasoline prices, have been very low. 

Either trend would suggest that people would have more money in their pockets and therefore would be out shopping and buying more stuff.  But that is not happening.

I am not a regular clothes shopper, but I have a few stores whose products I like.  I visit them when one of my "routes" takes me into their neighborhoods.

The last two stores I visited, in September and earlier this month, had storewide sales under way.  "All Women's Clothing 25% Off," was the sign in one.  In the other case, a  saleswomen phoned to give me the same message.

I bought a few things, but I don't think I'm going to be able to pull those stores out of their doldrums by the end of the year, which is what retailers seem to be fearing most.  In addition to the goods now on display, there are products still arriving that were ordered months ago for the holiday gift-giving season, typically the busiest of the retail year.   

My guess is that prices will be quite good for consumers through the rest of 2015.  

As for the stores, not so much. 

Parking in New York

Driving in New York City is in many ways its own punishment. 

I am speaking here only about parking. 

Last year, when the Significant Other and I drove into Manhattan to visit a museum, we were a bit surprised that parking the car cost more than the museum admission and lunch:  $61.  

So, this week, when we planned a similar venture, we consulted an iphone parking app that led us to the bargain-priced garage whose entrance is pictured above. 

Outside it displays its half-hour rate -- $8.45 plus the city's 18.375 percent parking tax.  That comes to $10 for a half hour.  Pretty steep.

Fortunately, there was a long-term rate of about $30 for stays over 2 hours. Since we planned to be in the city for three hours, our bill, with tax, came to about $35, plus the tip for the guy who pulled our car out of wherever it had been lodged in the bowels of the building.  
(The rate for stays of two hours or less is not as generous -- $25 plus tax.)


Residential Parking

In some ways, Manhattan residents get a better deal, an eight-point discount on the city's parking tax.  They are taxed only 10.375 percent for long-term parking.  (New York, like other American cities, favors its voting citizens over visitors in other ways -- think of taxes on rental cars and hotel rooms.)

In another way, however, Manhattan residents may have it worse.  Since 2012 there have been regular reports of parking spaces in swank new condo buildings or popular neighborhoods selling for $1 million each.  

Yes, a million bucks for a parking slot.  

This may be why Uber has become so popular in the city.


Bicycle Alternative

In the last few years, the city has been requiring parking lots to include spaces for bicycles.  Here is the rate quote at the place where we stopped:

Many bike owners in the city choose not to avail themselves of these rental spaces and instead park their vehicles on the streets.  

This comes with its own hazard.  Almost 5,000 bikes were reported stolen in the city last year, and thefts of expensive bikes (worth more than $1,000) were up by 64 percent.  

You may wonder why bike owners do not store their bikes in their apartments to prevent such losses.

I can tell you why.  I have visited New York apartments.  Unless owners are willing to sleep with their vehicles, there is simply no room for anything as large as a bicycle in a Manhattan apartment. 

Late in Life Parents

If you are a newspaper subscriber, you probably saw this story today. 

A husband and wife were surprised to find themselves new parents after 22 years of childless marriage.  The mother is 47.

Apparently, they were willing all along to have children, but never did. 

Recently, the mother found her menses had stopped and she was gaining weight.  As she explained it, she thought her body was turning into her mother's body.  (In middle age, it is not uncommon for women's bodies to thicken around the middle.)

On a recent night, the wife went to the emergency room with incredible abdominal pain.  Shortly afterward, a daughter was born.  Here the parents are, and both look pleased.  They named their daughter Carolyn Rose.

I traced this story back to the Massachusetts broadcaster that released it first and to the reactions of television viewers.

The hostility surprised me.  

Many commenters seemed to find it incredible that a 47-year-old woman did not consider that she might be pregnant after 22 years of childless marriage.  

Others suggested that the woman's husband might not be the father.

What a bunch of jerks.

I append here some less hostile comments from the local television station:
     
     Yeah happened to my friend's folks too. She was 46, he 48 and were just about 
     to celebrate their 30-year anniversary. She was in a small rural hospital with 
     severe pains and they did an X-ray and found him. He was born 20 min after spotted.

     I've known Judy for close to 25 years. She's very intelligent and she didn't have 
     the usual symptoms. I saw her myself not long ago when she had to have been 
     5-6 months along and she didn't show at all.

     Jason and Judy are thrilled. They will be great parents. They are both fun loving 
     and energetic. Jason is not a smiley person, but is over the moon. Congrats cuz

Friends in their neighborhood are scrambling to get all the baby stuff Carolyn Rose will require when she gets home.  Good for them.

I have been fortunate enough to be a parent myself.  I wish these two people well.

Babies are blessings, however they come.

Honoring Icons with Highway Rest Stops

What does New Jersey have against Walt Whitman?

He is the quintessential American writer who produced our most famous book of poetry, "Leaves of Grass." He is ranked with Herman Melville and Mark Twain in the American literary canon.  He has been admired by everyone from Andrew Carnegie to Ezra Pound to Harold Bloom.  His work inspired the Beat poets 60 years after his death.  I presume American schoolchildren still read his Lincoln elegy, "When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom'd." (If not, this is an omission to be remedied.)

Whitman suffered a serious stroke in his early 50s and moved from out of state to his brother's home in Camden, NJ, where he spent the last years of his life and died at age 72 in 1892.

So how does New Jersey celebrate this fine resident?

With a New Jersey Turnpike service area, of course.   Here are some photos:

Service areas are useful stops along busy freeways.  They are where you go to gas up your car, stretch your legs, use the facilities and buy greasy fast food or ice cream cones for restless children.  In New Jersey, these areas are generally well-maintained and run efficiently.

Still, if Walt Whitman were alive today, I don't think he'd be flattered to have his name attached to such a location.

And he is not the only one.  Jersey has many others, including these:

Woodrow Wilson, the former New Jersey governor and two-term president, also has an eponymous service area, the one nearest to Princeton University, whose president he was before he began his political career.

Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the US Treasury, is similarly honored.  His only journey to New Jersey (that I know of) was a rowboat trip across the Hudson River for a duel with Aaron Burr, who shot Hamilton dead.  The Alexander Hamilton Service Area is tastefully located near Weehawken, the site of that event.

Vince Lombardi is known mostly for coaching the dominant Green Bay Packers (in Wisconsin!) in the 1960s, but New Jersey cannot forget that he spent the first eight years of his career teaching and coaching at St. Cecilia High School in Englewood, NJ.  So he, too, is lauded with a rest area.

The list goes on and on -- Thomas Edison, James Fenimore Cooper, Clara Barton, Grover Cleveland, Molly Pitcher, Joyce Kilmer and others.   All fine people.  All commemorated with highway service areas.

The New Jersey Turnpike is, like its service areas, a necessary but unlovely part of the Garden State, a traffic-choked section of I-95, the national highway that runs from New England to Florida.  It teems with large trucks and many obnoxious drivers.

My guess is that whoever dreamed up the idea to name pike service areas after famous people thought it was a great idea.  No doubt he (and I bet it was a he) thought pinning famous names on service areas would class them up a bit.  So far it's not working.

I'm pretty sure even Donald Trump, who now mostly licenses his name for big buildings, would not care to have a highway service area named after him.

So is it really an honor to recognize Jersey's most famous citizens in this unfortunate way?

The Night Sky

Not so many years ago, the Significant Other and I made annual trips to rural Maine to visit the younger person at summer camp.  Every Saturday, parents were invited for a barbecue dinner and, after dark, a traditional campfire gathering.

The camp was in a remote area and mostly not wired for electricity.  The evening events were always pleasant, but what I came to like most about them was the chance to stare up at a clear night sky. 

I've posted a picture of such a sky but, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the difference between the vast night sky and a picture of it is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.*

Clearly man's invention and adoption of electricity have enriched the world.  Now we can stay up late, keep warm and then cool in different seasons, travel safely at any hour, participate in evening social activities, and prepare and store food more efficiently.  (The self of my childhood would add that electricity allowed me to read books by flashlight after I had been sent to bed earlier than I preferred.)  

So electricity has made us healthier and broadened our social connections. But it has not answered the big questions of mankind, and it comes with an odd cost that goes unmentioned and that cannot be quantified.

It is the loss of personal confrontation with the enormity of the universe -- or at least the galaxy -- in which we find ourselves.  It is the physical world's assertion of how small a single human is in an enormous, unknowable reality.

Those brief moments in rural Maine filled me with awe and humility.   

Until 150 years or so ago, the regular encounter with a star-filled night sky was the common experience of all mankind.  

Thousands of years ago, it inspired the ancients to study the patterns of stars' locations, the phases of the moon and the Milky Way.  Since then astronomers and cosmologists have added to our store of knowledge about these things, but what they have learned does not puncture the grandeur of the night scene.  Instead it has shown us that the vastness we see is but a small part of an unimaginably greater system.  

The night sky in Maine shifted my attention from my trivial human reality.  It reminded me that, essentially, I am one of seven billion insects scurrying around on a tiny ant farm.  It was a humbling experience, but a grounding one.  It made me take my daily concerns a little less seriously.



*Twain, an author and humorist, referred to the process of writing -- "The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."  

Desnudas Forever

Last summer, I commented on the desnuda phenomenon in New York's Times Square.  The mostly naked ladies wearing mostly body paint seemed to appear with the nice weather and the summer crowds. If you wanted a picture of yourself with one of them, you could arrange it for about $20.

Mostly the desnuda customers were men or teenage boys.  Local merchants and city officials were dismayed and tried without success to stop it, but the painted ladies were popular and reported to be taking in as much as $300 daily, or about five times as much as the Elmos and Spidermans who had been working Times Square for several years.*

Sex sells, of course. 

Summer High Points

     -- A 46-year-old bank executive from out of town ventured over to Times 
     Square to have himself photographed with two desnudas.  When he 
     reached into his back pocket  to pull out his wallet and give them a tip,
     he discovered his pocket had been picked.  The two ladies said he then 
     hit them.  They dared him to find his wallet on their persons.  We know
     the desnudas have "assistants" or "boyfriends" (or pimps) to 
     hold their clothes and protect them.  My guess is one of those gentlemen 
     got the wallet, but who knows?  The matter is now in court.

     -- One desnuda and her "boyfriend" had the misfortune to attract the 
     attention of two plainclothes NYPD detectives.  They enticed the officers
     to a private location, where the boyfriend sold one cop illegal drugs
     and the lovely lady quoted the other a price for a blow job.  Legal
     proceedings ensued.

     -- Another desnuda, perhaps whose babysitter bailed on her, brought
     her two-year-old daughter to work with her one day.  The girl was attired 
     (or perhaps unattired) like her mother, with no shirt but an artistically
     rendered heart painted on her toddler chest. 
          Surprisingly, not even one man in the louche Times Square crowd was 
     interested in paying for a topless mother-daughter photo. 
          A police officer, one of the many who now prowl the area, urged the
     mom and child to put their clothes on and go home.  
    
     -- At least one female newspaper reporter got painted up and strutted through 
     Times Square for a desnuda-for-a-day story.  A second woman writer, for a 
     weekly, participated in a nude body painting event in Bryant Park and also
     filed a first-person story.   
          Both women appeared to be good sports, and pictures of both appeared
     in their respective newspapers.  I assume neither was pressured by editors 
     to take on her assignment.    
    

By early August, the squares in city government, the police department and the Times Square merchants association had had enough of the naked women, cartoon characters and beggars who pestered tourists and office workers in always-crowded Times Square.   

The squares formed a working group that was immediately dubbed the Topless Task Force.  After several meetings, the TTF recommended new rules for 2016.  They suggested setting aside specific areas -- one for cartoon characters, one for desnudas -- to let tourists seek out their preferred photo friends rather than the other way around, and also to improve traffic flow for the hundreds of thousands of visitors who for some reason flock to Times Square each day.

To my knowledge, no official action has been taken yet on the proposal.


Still Not Over

And then the weather began to cool, as it does in the autumn.  The summer waves of vacationing families had gone home and the children were back in school.  

Surely, I thought, this was the end of the desnudas story, at least until spring 2016.

Alas, no. The desnuda phenomenon seems to have moved into popular culture.  My bet is that nubile and mostly naked working women will be appearing at other popular gathering spots in warmer climes over the winter and in cities nationwide next summer. 

A couple entrepreneurial desnudas and their male assistant already are pitching for paid private appearances  And, of course, a reality TV show. 

One article said this:
     
     "The women have also been contacted about appearing on a live Times 
     Square show on New Year's Eve as well. 
         "'Just like the showgirls from Vegas, the desnudas will become the trademark of 
      'New York City,' (one) added."
         (If the mayor read the above, my bet is that it made his head explode.)

Advertising professionals, always looking for new ideas, have taken up the desnuda as well. I found this promotion for a new perfume in a magazine last month.

Is this a great country or what?



*When I mentioned the earnings of Times Square photo-posers, I spoke only of their gross incomes.  Naturally, when these workers file their tax returns in April, they will make Social Security and Medicare contributions, as well as federal and state (and possibly NYC city) income tax payments, which will reduce their take-home pay by a certain amount. 

An Update and Some Nitpicking

The picture above is of an Ai Weiwei Lego sculpture. It is one of 176 images of political prisoners made by the Chinese artist and displayed last year at the former Alcatraz Prison in California.  

Recently Lego refused to sell any of its products to Ai, a former political prisoner himself, because Lego did not want its toys involved in politics.  I discussed this a couple weeks ago -- "Thinking About China: Ai Weiwei."

Well, hahaha.  On Oct. 21, the the British firm that operates Legoland theme parks announced that its next location will be in -- of all places -- Shanghai, which happens to be in China.  What a surprise.  

Meanwhile, volunteers in cities around the world (including Beijing) are collecting Legos to send to Ai; You can look them up on Twitter at #LegosforWewei.  

Happily, not everybody is afraid of a little bit of politics. 

More Fun with Words

I now will don my curmudgeon hat.  Follow along if you wish.

-----

"Much of the case centered around a 2011 state law regarding program accreditations, and whether or not the school properly notified students about the law."

     

     This "centered around" business has to stop.  A thing can be in the center 

     of something or around the center.  By definition, it cannot be both.  The

     phrase is sloppy and discredits the person who uses it.

     

     Also, "whether" is just as good as "whether or not," and probably better.  

     "Whether" implies the possibility of "or not."  

     Back in the days of hot type, when every single character in a news story 

     was plugged manually into a heavy frame for printing, editors prized 

     economies of phrasing.  They excised "or not" every time they saw it. 

     The practice should be resumed. 

-----

"A spokesman for Star Career Academy said in a written statement Monday that the school previously determined the state law did not impact its students ability to practice as surgical techs in the state and stands by its program." 

     Fish in a barrel here.  "Students ability" makes no sense.  "Students' ability" 
     does make sense.

     "And stands by its program" is too far away from "the school previously 
     determined." The result is confusing.  

     In my journalism school, this kind of sentence would be marked "CNS," 
     for "chicken noodle soup."  I don't know the origin of this formulation, 
     but once you hear it, you remember it.  And you know it when you see it. 

-----

"Christie accused Sweeney of acting on motives of wanting to be the state's next governor."

     "Acting on motives?"  Really?  Any thoughtful fifth grader could write 
     a more effective sentence here.

-----

 The juvenile was court-ordered to stay at Ranch Hope.

     No.  Court-hyphen-ordered is not a descriptive phrase here.  It also is not 
     a verb.  And "stay" is a weak formulation for imprisonment. The juvenile 
     isn't being told to walk to the Ranch House and "stay" there.

     Better -- "The judge ordered the juvenile to be held at Ranch House."