Where's All the Cars?

I have noticed, along with my boss from work, that there just aren't as many cars driving on the streets as there were a few years ago. Gas prices are just now starting to come down which is good in my opinion. I work for a small family owned Ace Hardware store in Rancho Cucamonga and business has not been good during the last year. Many times through out the day our parking lot is empty. Sometimes it can be empty for twenty minutes straight.

My manager, Frank, who is known to all our regular customers as a really good handy man, thinks that it is because of the shape our economy is in right now. Many people just don't have enough money to fix up there house right now. We make a lot of our profit from people who do small weekend projects on their houses. Like fixing the handle on their toilet, or patching a leak in their roof, or painting a room in their house. We are like a small Home Depot. A lot of the time we have the things that Home Depot doesn't. We might have a small wheel that goes on the bottom of a screen door or something odd like that. I always hear of people saying "I've been looking all over for a month for this part." I would imagine that it is hard just for the store to break even.

There just aren't as many people leaving their houses to go anywhere. Back in the late 1990's, business was booming for everyone. Houses were extremely expensive and construction was at an all time high. Now people cannot even find enough work in the field of construction. It is kind of scary because almost everyday Frank usually says, "Where is everybody?" Archibald, which is the major street that the store is on is very quiet throughout the day. There used to be a lot of traffic on it. I guess it is just part of the business cycle that we are in right now and we will get out of it some day.