Signs of Hard Times...

...that Lee Hansen noticed this in Missouri...

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/7780940/signs_of_the_times.html?cat=9

during the same week I was noticing it in Kingsport, Tennessee. In the course of research for a Yahoo article a friend and I drove through a neighborhood I remembered as a magnet for yuppie entrepreneurs of the 1980s. Many of the businesses had closed. Many had been replaced by pawn shops, loan sharks, or places that advertised that they bought gold. Only a few businesses still existed, and their shiny yuppie facades had been allowed to fade into shabby conformity with what was now a depressed neighborhood.

Even back in the 1950s people like Dorothy Sayers and Vance Packard were telling us that the Waste Age couldn't last forever. Those who chose to simplify and stay close to the land in the late twentieth century may be better off now than those who bought into yuppie watchwords like "You have to spend money to make money" and "Packaging sells everything."