Chanukah presents are supposed to make a fellow happy but this
one made me sad. It was tendered tenderly enough by loving family
members, but after registering the sentiment of the familial I
found myself becoming sentimental over the loss of the familiar.
The gift was a gorgeous sweater, bought in the waning moments
before Filene’s Basement disappears from the American scene.
Together with its parent company, Sym’s, it will pass in mere days
into the realm of the nostalgic.
My sadness is not so much for the loss of Sym’s as a
purchasing venue, although I have been a customer for about 35
years. I have in fact always enjoyed its atmosphere, its buying eye
and its selling style. But that sort of bond is easily transferred
to another store or chain. The tragedy is that the reason Sym’s and
Filene’s have been euthanized is the decline of American
prosperity.
That’s right. Although they are discount outlets, their
success was based on the overflow with which God blessed America.
When the rich got richer the poor got richer by getting these
bargains. The irony here is that our nation slipping from
prosperity to austerity is depleting the stock at the bargain
table.
The way it works is as follows. When times are plush and
wallets are flush, manufacturers churn out lots of stuff. All kinds
of stuff. High end, low end and middle middle. These makers figure
they are in the field of dreams, and if they build it we will come.
Some trendy fashion idea, a new nuance in some item, a kitschy new
gadget, a whiz of a gizmo: the big cheeses turn them out in the
hope of building a better mousetrap. When in doubt, put it out.
“Whatsamatta, you don’t want one of these. Okay, take a
dozen.”
Many products become cheaper to make when made in larger
quantities. Some huge machine gets turned on for eight hours; you
can either produce a thousand widgets at a cost of 16 cents apiece
or two thousand at 11 cents apiece. In The History of the
Jews, Paul Johnson says that the Jews invented the volume
discount, but volume manufacture was probably invented by some more
populous bunch. Certainly a country like China with a billion
citizens understands that less is not more; more is
more.
When the bounty flows, when there is money around, the
risk-takers take risks. They make tons of beautiful suits, scores
of magnificent dresses. They do it hoping to sell them to the rich
folks for big money but inevitably there is overstocking, Mister
Moneybags decides the pants are too baggy, Miss Prim decides the
dress is not dressy enough, and now the Sir Plus line turns into
surplus.
The reason why Sym’s and Filene’s have been unable to make
money the last few years, despite the fact that there are more
people feeling the pinch and looking to save a buck, is that there
is no excess inventory anymore. The first company along the line is
missing and the assembly is breaking down. The business model of
Sym’s and Filene’s is to sell an upper-middle-class look for a
lower-middle-class price. They can do that only when the
overachievers are overproducing and selling them the
spillover.
Actually, Filene’s was around for a hundred years and
Sym’s only for half that much, but the latter had bought the former
somewhere along the line. Now we will find ourselves with fewer
opportunities to cross the lines. The rich people will buy the rich
look and the poor people will have to buy the poor look. Not only
are we losing our job creators, we are losing our job-lot
creators.
The economy has been perched on the precipice for a few
years now, and the Darwinian results are some tragic extinctions.
As some of the building-blocks of the lavish life we once took for
granted are crumbling, we find ourselves in an increasingly
precarious position. And I do remember one thing from my college
Latin: that the root of “precarious” is the Latin precare,
to pray…
