This morning on Morning Joe, David Gregory asked whether Americans are "feeling" the stimulus. Yeah, I know. Gross.
Anyway, this is a phenomenon that I've been thinking about a lot lately. Personally, I'm feeling it a little. Just in terms of being a small business owner -- a business of one -- money appears to be loosening up among the people who usually hire me to produce things. Slowly and very cautiously, though. This cuts across all forms of media I'm involved with, from web to television to print.
Meanwhile, over the last year or so, whenever I would dare to venture into the massive shopping district near my house -- the area with the big mall, the Target, the Walmart, the chain restaurants, and so forth -- and I see the sheer volumes of shoppers, filling parking lots and packing the corridors of the mall, I can't help but to ask myself, "What recession?"
If I wasn't instantly repulsed by the shopping area, I would probably put on my journalist hat and take the time to ask around. So I can only assume that they're not buying as much shit as they used to, or maybe they're just wandering around the Bed, Bath & Beyond parking lot out of habit while racking up more debt on credit cards.
Clearly, there's been a huge, dark, awful recession with high unemployment, but I think there have been a considerable number of Americans who were in total denial about it, and therefore, "feeling" the recovery isn't such a big changeover. There's nothing scientific about this observation, of course, but there it is.