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Originally Posted by Undertoad
Oh, and one more economic indicator that's fun to track. Jacquelita's brother is a UPS driver. They were utterly swamped over this Christmas season, way above and beyond previous Christmasses.
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I asked for numbers from some UPSes drivers. For example, one noted he makes about 175 stops per day. During a previous Christmas, his highest stops was 371. Two weeks before Christmas, he was already doing over 400 stops every day.
Meanwhile, traditional stores were seeing poor sales after an initial Thanksgiving week boom. However sales in the last week started to recover. I still don't see any final numbers from the traditional 'brick and mortar' stores yet. But numbers from both UPS and Fed Ex AND numbers from some UPS drivers suggest Internet sales were quite successful this year. Amazon.com is rumored to have done quite well.
This was a surprise to many economists who are worried about how 'tapped out' consumers are. It suggests consumer debt load, that has been unusually high, will even be higher. Previously posted is how credit card companies are now mining for higher profits. Get you in on real low interest rates. Then suddenly jack those rates up from 8% to 20 or 30%. Credit card companies are also said to be doing quite well with so many leaving unpaid debt every month on those cards.
The amount of government and consumer debt is worrying economists.