Black Friday shoppers enter Macy’s on Union Square in San Francisco on Nov. 24. Retail experts foresee decent sales growth for luxury goods, toys and tech during the holiday season.
On paper, everything’s going great in the United States.
On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy added 199,000 jobs in November, with hourly earnings up by 4% during 2023. Holiday shopping, a yearly indicator of economic health, is looking up, too: Retail experts foresee decent sales growth for luxury goods, toys and tech during the holiday season, especially among younger generations. Gen Z and Millennials are expected to spend more this year compared to 2022. According to data from Adobe, in the peak hour (7 p.m.-8 p.m.) of this year’s Cyber Monday, “consumers spent $15.7 million every minute.”
Yet despite all that spending, Americans are still incredibly anxious about the economy.
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In a November CNN poll of 1,795 American adults, 84% of respondents said they were worried about the economy; in fact, 71% rated it as “poor,” and a majority don’t believe it’s going to get better.
Are Americans just ignorant? Or, as one Financial Times analyst put it, are our individual politics warping our sense of reality?
It’s a key question that will dog President Joe Biden as well as anyone hoping to take his seat next year. But I get why Americans are so discontented.
Everything costs more now, from basic groceries to the prestige television shows you need to pay multiple bespoke streamers to access. People have taken to the streets in several cities to protest the way the U.S. sends a mind-boggling amount of money every year to subsidize military ventures for allies like the Philippines and Israel. And even if there are more jobs on the market, the number of people patching together a life via unstable and benefit-free gig work has grown tremendously, to what the World Bank estimates to be 12% of the global labor market.
In the Bay Area, achieving the so-called markers of American middle-class life — a family, a house, a decent retirement fund — has become nearly impossible for non-millionaires and likely for a decent share of millionaires, too.
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A 2023 San Jose State University study found that 0.001% of the households in Silicon Valley now possess $260 billion in total wealth; meanwhile, the average number of people served each month by Second Harvest of Silicon Valley food bank is up 80% from 2019. There are more homeless young people in San Jose than anywhere else in the country.
Most of us are much closer to joining those young people on the streets than becoming billionaires.
Looking at all the homes I can’t buy on Zillow just makes me depressed, and every time I feel depressed, I buy yet another plant for my little apartment. Sure, one could argue that every succulent on my shelf is a teeny-tiny bite taken out of a future down payment on a house. But I don’t think most Americans know how else to address our frustration over how fragile it all seems.
In a recent newsletter, the writer P.E. Moskowitz also blames COVID-19 for Americans’ dissatisfaction. They wrote, “We have not collectively recovered from a several-year period of watching millions of people die while strapped to machines in hospital parking lots and hallways; of being isolated from each other for longer than we ever have been; of being scared of the simple human pleasures of touch and camaraderie. In other words, we all have PTSD, and none of us seem willing to admit it.”
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In a call, Moskowitz said that we still need to grieve.
COVID took so much away from us, and you saw some emotional-economic reaction to that once lockdowns abated: The coining of the phrase “revenge travel” for the uptick in global tourism as borders opened up in 2022 says a lot.
As a Millennial New Yorker, I’ll always remember those weird days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when then-President George W. Bush told us to just act normal, go to work and spend money: “We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don’t conduct business — where people don’t shop.”
In San Francisco, then-Mayor Willie Brown, flanked by his motorcade, drove down to Union Square and exhorted residents to buy, buy, buy.
Is it any surprise that in the shadow of a mass mortality event, we’re doing what we’ve been trained to do? No one said we had to be happy about it, but the small dopamine hit that comes with buying a new iPhone is at least something.
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For folks without much economic footing, spending might take the place of stability: a method of gaining some semblance of control, or solace, in uncertain times.
Per Moskowitz’s take, trauma has a way of foreclosing on the future.
Next year, whichever presidential candidate can articulate a better future will likely win the day. Because as it stands, all of this spending has major long-term implications. This year, Americans collectively accumulated a record $1 trillion in credit card debt, and usage of high-interest buy now, pay later platforms is expected to triple to 900 million users by 2027.
If there’s any solution out of economic despair, this isn’t it.
Reach Soleil Ho (they/them): soleil@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hooleil
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