Depression...not in WR

Paul Krugman has a piece in the NY Times talking about the third Depression. Not in WR - we must be booming.

First we have the landscaper. He came out twice, talked with us, measured our land and told us he would be back in two weeks. A month later I call him and he acted like we'd never met. When I told him he had been to our house twice, he apologized, but said it would be a couple more weeks - he failed to make a plan. Now we aren't talking about a couple of bushes -we're talking thousands of dollars worth of projects. Business must be really good to not worry about getting new business.

Then there are my drapes. I started this adventure with a local custom made business. She quoted me a price - which was quite high. However, they do quality work and I liked what she said.  She left my house and not ten minutes later called to say that she made a "slight" mistake. Her slight mistake was that she had the wrong prices on her fabric.This mistake was going to cost me an extra $800.  I don't know about you but that isn't slight. Now these are not new fabrics so I question the validity of her numbers. If I can't trust her, I won't do business with her. Therefore we went somewhere else.

So we go the the furniture store and order our drapes.  I ordered them six weeks ago. They told me they would be here last week. (After they told me it would just take a couple of weeks) We've scheduled and cancelled installation three times already.  So I called today - they came in. They just didn't call to tell me - I'm glad that this furniture store is doing so well that they don't need to provide good customer service.

These are just examples where we have wanted to spend quite a bit of money locally.  So next time a local business whines that business is down and the locals are shopping out of town I'm going to tell them why I'm shopping out-of-town.