the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Thanks and No Thanks

(Nov. 22, 2007)  If this were any place but here, local reporters would be getting out of bed at 4 a.m. this Friday morning, dragging themselves down to Wal-Mart and waiting in line with the consumers eager to get their hands on cheap X-Mas geegaws. The reporter would examine the minds and wallets of these citizens, and with this evidence she would attempt to scry the state of the United States economy. How many $498 flat-screen televisions were sold, and what does that say about consumers’ fears about the subprime mortgage crisis? How quickly did that $128 Garmin pocket GPS navigator sell out? Could that indicate that gas prices are taking their toll on recreational automobile travel? What do digital camera sales tell us about our balance-of-payments deficit and our geopolitical standing vis-à-vis China?

In the newspaper business, there are three universal things to know about the day after Thanksgiving. One: About half the people in the country are down with tryptophan hangovers, leaving them in a lazy mood and filled with warm, inchoate thoughts about family, country, favored sports teams, the inevitability of death. Two: The other half are out on a frenzied shopping spree, battling in the aisles for the biggest bargains of the year. Three: There’s absolutely nothing else going on. These three powerful currents combine to give us the post-Thanksgiving story on economic affairs.

Things being what they are, our local contributions to this time-honored genre will have to be set at Target, with a nod toward Old Town. We won’t be able to be there, alas. Instead, we’ll take a moment to look through the other end of the telescope, casting ourselves forward amongst the digestifs that our colleagues and competitors will offer at the end of the week.

Ladies and gentlemen, what is the state of the Humboldt County economy? We stand before you today and say — the state of the Humboldt County economy is strong. It’s the goddamn United States of America we have to worry about, as usual.

First, the positive news. Humboldt State Economics Professor Steve Hackett recently took it upon himself to make his best guess at the size of the local marijuana economy. This heretofore elusive figure has been much in demand of late, and not just from owners of medical marijuana clubs. As everyone knows, the straight world is making plenty of coin off Humboldt County’s number one crop — see “Green from Gold in a Gray Area,” Nov. 8, for a bit of surface-scratching — and there have been those who have long feared that legalization would come along and screw up everything.

Well, good news from Dr. Hackett. Though he readily admits that there’s plenty of room for error, his initial comparison of retail sales with on-the-books disposable income would suggest that there’s somewhere around half a billion dollars annually floating around the Humboldt County economy that has no business being here. This would suggest that our governmental price-control teams, busily ripping up plants out in the hills, have been wonderfully effective.

Partly as a result, perhaps, we simply kick ass on almost all other small-town economies in the country. The Policom Corporation, a consultancy based in Florida, ranked us as the 21st-strongest “micropolitan” economic area in the country, out of a list of 576 similarly sized places. The rankings take into account jobs, wages and earnings as well as “negative” factors like rates of welfare and government medical assistance. We’ve been shooting up the Policom list of late — back in 2004, we ranked 137th.

Now the bad news. Though there’s been great growth in the North Coast technology sector lately, providing plenty of great jobs for local folks, there simply isn’t as much good news out there for traditional blue-collar workers. Though there’s a vibrant and growing light manufacturing scene in Arcata, it doesn’t quite replace traditional mainstays like timber and fishing. But such is the story across the U.S.A. We don’t control the tides, but we seem to be surfing the waves far better than most.

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