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Retail Executives Discover the Recession is “Not Yet Over” for Their Employees

You may have heard that Black Friday weekend sales are down this year and the retail industry has one possible explanation that should be obvious but clearly wasn’t to them.

Executives at the retail federation, which had predicted strong growth in sales this holiday season, appeared at a loss to fully explain the drop-off.

The results could show that “there are a significant number of Americans out there for whom the recession is not yet over,” said Matthew Shay, the group’s president and chief executive.

This was unintentionally funny to me because one group of people, among many, that can be counted among those “for whom the recession is not yet over” are retail employees.

A century ago at least one executive understood that if you pay your employees enough money to buy your own products, you will ultimately prosper from it. At some point in time, executives decided that was bullshit.

Speaking for myself, I bought virtually nothing over the weekend because there were no deals on the items I wanted to purchase as Christmas gifts for others. There was a veritable fire-sale on blu-rays last year, but this year the deals have been poor or non-existent.