Thursday, May 14, 2009

At least the Tigers are not terrible this year..


What a crazy economy we are living in right now where the white-collar guys seem to be coming out of this thing a bit with a fairly steady northern trend in the stock markets but the blue collar guys are still sitting around waiting for something to trickle down to them.

I just spent a half a week in Detroit and the next time I want to have this much fun I’ll go to a morgue. You drive past Chrysler plants and there are two sets of parking lots. One of them is packed to the gills (with new cars) and the other one looks like somebody dropped the A-Bomb on it (the cars where the employees would otherwise park. The funny thing about the first parking lot was that it was so packed that there wasn’t even any room between the cars, if you had to get the last car out of the lot because the customer needed to have the purple Geo with the crappy rims than it would have entailed a ridiculously complicated game where you have to get all your numbers in a row with only one open spot to get it out.

It is absolutely nuts to think how far we have gone from the peak of the car market (16 million cars sold per year) to now when I think they are going to have 3 for the price of 1 deals hitting the markets soon. You know it’s bad when the average Michigonian is actually looking forward to seeing Matt Stafford. The funny thing is that Detroit is becoming like New Jersey which embraced Born to Run as its theme song not realizing it was all about trying to get out of the arm-pit of America, this is about the same thing as being that excited about the new Eminem for a Detroitian.

At the end of the day, the car companies can get new management and Obama can force them to build more fuel efficient cars and you can offer to throw in an unlimited warranty and a free oil change but it doesn’t matter when nobody is buying any cars. It’s like painting the deck of the Titanic as it is sinking, you may have the nicest looking piece of crap on the bottom of the ocean floor but you are still swimming with the fishes.

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