Consuming Confidently?

I wonder where I can get a little consumer confidence? Any ideas? It’s harder to find, these days, since it’s on the same level as my subterranean den. I’d buy some, if there were any to be had, but, alas no dice. Seriously, most people aren’t putting their hands in their pockets for anything but the basics, because consumer confidence has gone the way of James Bond’s martini; its been shaken not stirred. Antithetical, don’t you think…this condition, to what this country was founded on? And what foundations are those, you ask? Liberty? Freedom? The pursuit of humane healthcare? No. Handing your money over as soon as you’ve made it, of course: reflex consumption.

Personally, I’d like to help…patriotically participate in this income for crap exchange thing. To my reckoning it isn’t that I don’t have any money, which I don’t. It has to do with the fact I have even less consumer confidence. And it is easy to see how this has come about. On the one hand; wages have been cut, benefits now resemble detriments, 401Ks have an employer $0 match, bonuses minused and the freaking Thanksgiving turkey fund cooked. No wonder nobody’s forking over the mullah. And on the other hand, thanks to our socially minded corporations, consumers are fleeing for the sanity of asceticism. To compare spending to swimming from one side to the other of a shark-infested pool is no stretch. Take banks and their best practice of bilking customers of their money. See Bank of America’s “Keep The Change” program. If you don’t keep a minimum of $300 dollars in the account, they take $5 per month as an inconvenience for your inability to find the money to reach their specified amount. Forget, that in 2010 you are even saving; you’re just not saving the way B of A wants you to. Then there’s Toyota and their accelerators with minds of their own. Oversight? Or the Japanese version of “Let them eat cake?” What about tainted infant formula, BPAs in most everything, Vioxx, or Madoff’s little gaff?

No, consumer confidence. In fact, the term, due to our predicament, should reflect the sign of our times. “Con Con” is adequate and suitably downsized.

In case you didn’t know, because I didn’t, consumer confidence is an index, a statistical barometer, which financial or economic performance is measured. Yeah. And I don’t have any, so I don’t perform. It’s gotten so bad that my con con is the equivalent of buyer’s remorse. I bought my wife flowers the other day. The florist made me feel as though I were buying a Porsche, she was so happy to have an average Joe handing over cash. Did she think it was a sign of better days…an economic upturn? No. It was an agonized purchase that left me scrambling to fill the $25 hole I’d created in my straightjacketed budget.

The American economy is geared towards spending. Captains of industry have legitimate concerns that Americans might now mow their own lawns, wash their own cars, iron their own shirts and put what little dough they have in coffee cans. And, really can you blame us? So on that sunny day, when we feel good about ourselves and we reach into our pockets and pull out a freshly dispensed twenty-dollar bill for a little well-earned extravagance, the feeling that what we’re holding has already diminished by the conniving banks and that the goods we’re about to buy may be harmful to us sends in the clouds. And like Punxsutawney Phil holding up a confused groundhog, the shadow cast by the twenty quickly fades away and spring for our con con follows suit.