Good stories for Christmas, please

While I count the days to this blessed, blessed gift of an extra long Christmas break—during which I’d have to go on mandatory leave—I while away my short breaks by doing some surfing on the web. Now, I subscribe to many feeds, but when I only have 20 minutes to spare and I’m not playing Guess the Sketch or Plurking, I’d really much rather do some web surfing.

I start with Yahoo, check what’s interesting, and leave if nothing catches my fancy. I do the same with www.perezhilton.com and www.pep.ph, my two guilty reads. If both disappoint for the day, I go back to Plurk and finally make the effort to click on the links my chatty Plurk friends have been sharing. Click after click, I usually find my way to an interesting, if not good, read.

This week, it was all about the United States economy and related topics. Not my usual fare, but since it’s Christmas, I was wondering about the holiday spending in their part of the globe. I followed the news about the Black Friday stampede in Long Island, New York, where a Wal-Mart worker died. Black Friday refers to the Friday after Thanksgiving in the US, which is the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season. News reports said people continued shopping even as Wal-Mart announced it was closing because of the death. I don’t know if people are making it out to be more than it is, because of the economic conditions in the US. Outside of that, however, it’s still pretty sad when somebody dies because people just want to shop.

I’ve also been visiting the International Herald Tribune website often, checking out the business news and sniffing out the news on shopping. When the economy is bad—and if media portrays the situation to be worse than it really is—people hold on tighter to their money, and, in effect, contribute to the economic slowdown. It pays to be prudent when it comes to spending, I believe, but nobody benefits when one is a tightwad. These days, I’ve been wondering which one I am.

On www.iht.com, I read about how luxury spending is entering a new trend: “stealth wealth” or “discreet luxury.” People who still have a lot of money—or people bucking the recession trend—actually feel guilty about letting other people know about this. As a result, they veer away from purchasing ostentatious items, like bags that have the label emblazoned on them, or those double-C Chanel earrings celebrities and high society fashion icons wear. They still spend, all right, but they spend on expensive, yet understated quality items. At least in the US.

Of all the articles I read, only one was positive. A www.forbes.com article “Finding reasons for optimism in the U.S. economy” by Joshua Zumbrun lists ten reasons to be optimistic about the economy. The one closely linked to shopping says that history suggests American consumers don’t stay depressed for long. The US may officially be in recession now, but Zumbrun quotes economist Joel Naroff as saying, “You go out eight months from now... People discover they still have their jobs. Businesses have realized that while conditions aren’t great, they’re not going to fold. They ask, ‘Why am I behaving as if everything is going to collapse tomorrow?’ And they come to the conclusion it’s not, and that’s when they start spending.”

I appreciate www.forbes.com for having an article like that, since all I’ve been seeing are gloomy stories—if not about the global economic situation, about Mumbai, Bangkok, and the circus that is Philippine politics. It takes me quite a while to step back and remind myself of three key things: media is a business, people choose the headlines, and bad news sells. Then I take a deep breath.

It helped that I also came across an article from Bo Sanchez who said, “Don’t join the recession!”

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