As public officials continue to tell us the economy is going well, the Retail Apocalypse continues apocalypting in the background. The word just came out that Party City is shuttingdown all of its stores, and also that Big Lots is bankrupt and beginning "going out of business" sales. Two more well known national chains of retail stores are going under. This video above tells the story of the rise and fall of Party City. It's December 20th, 2024 as I write this, office Christmas/holiday party season, and a week and a half before New Year's Eve. Did everyone stop partying?
I live in the San Fernando Valley these days, a place where there's a lot of wealth in the general area. But one Big 5 just closed, and a Guitar Center store just closed as well, not to mention all of the 99 Cents Only stores that all closed down months ago. This is in an area where there are hundreds of "mom and pop," privately owned, brick and mortar stores that are still in business. But as the flood of pandemic stimulus money got spent, business has slowed back down for many stores, and major shutdowns are happening again. Here's a video about the downfall of Big Lots.
There are a whole bunch of reasons for these stores closing down, like the rise of online sales, getting bought out and loaded up with debt by private equity companies, and the sales slowdown of the pandemic. These factors are part of the bigger picture of why these particular chains have closed down. In any case, two more chains are going under, and hundreds of large stores are going to become vacant soon in cities across the United States.
The term "Retail Apocalypse" popped up around 2016, as chain store closures and dead malls became a trend. In reality, many stores had been closing for a decade before that, but those closures increased dramatically around 2015-2016-2017, as online sales surged. Chalk up a couple more large chain closures to the list of dozens of other retail chains that have become extinct, like Toys-R-Us, Radio Shack, and others.
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Over the last couple of years, Reventure Consulting founder Nick Gerli has built an amazing app to look at residential real estate all over the United States. In this video, out a few days ago, he takes a look at where prices are likely to go up, and likely to go down, around the state of California. Hint: Here in SoCal, the region from downtown L.A. west through Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Santa Monica is going one direction, and Orange County is doing the opposite. Watch the video to see his overview of the state, and then check out Reventure App to check our neighborhood.
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I'm doing most of my writing on a platform called Substack now, which was designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
Here is Andy Ruffel, doing a 360 off a jump, on a BMX bike in 1981, for a British TV show. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first BMX 360 jump caught on video or film, and it happened 43 Years ago.
In late 2021, I had a crazy idea for a blog post. "What if I search YouTube for all the earliest, 'first on video' clips of BMX 360's and variations of 360's?" I wondered just how far back the basic 360 jump on a bike went. When I was first reading the BMX magazines every month, in 1983, I remembered a story saying that Eddie Fiola did a 360 over doubles in a race, at the Orange YMCA BMX track, I believe. That was where I started my search, looking for the first 360 on video. At the time, Mike Varga had just landed the first 1260 air, a few months earlier, at the X-Games in Riverside, California. It seemed a good time to dig into the video archives of BMX spinning tricks.
This basic search for the first BMX 360 on video opened a huge can of worms, and I wound up spending something like three weeks watching dozens and dozens of BMX videos, looking for 360's, 540's, 720's, 900's, and other variations. The blog post was epic, with links to dozens of "first on video" clips of BMX spinning tricks. Here's that post from November 2021:
In my research, this clip of Andy Ruffel had the earliest BMX 360's I could find, both 360 bunnyhops (also called a "360 whip floater" then), and a 360 over a small jump. At about 25:20 in that clip, you see Andy Ruffel, in front of a moving airplane, do some 360 bunnyhops, among other tricks. He also does a 360 off a mellow jump at 26:04. Three years ago, that was the earliest 360 jump I could find, Andy Ruffel, in the U.K., in 1983. Today, when I looked it up, the short video clip embedded above came up, again with Andy Ruffell, predating this clip by two years. So now, it looks like the clip above, Andy Ruffell in 1981, is the very first 360 jump on a BMX bike that's out there. That means we've now had 43 years of BMX 360 jumps on video, and that called for a blog post. You can check that Spinaroonie blog post for dozens more "first on video" BMX spinning variations. But here's a few more of the early ones.
If you lived in Los Angeles in the 1980's and 1990's, you've heard of Angelyne. According to one account, she started putting up billboards of herself in 1984. I think the first one I saw was in Hollywood, probably 1988 or 1989. It was around that time that I started to drive up there, doing runs, picking up equipment for my job. It was also around that time I started going to punk gigs up there once in a while. Angelyne is the single name L.A. Billboard Queen of the Los Angeles in the 1980's, and is basically famous for being famous. Before the Kardashians, before Paris Hilton, before the internet, before influencers as a job title, there was Angelyne... and her hot pink Corvette.
A few days ago, I got a book from the library called Binge Times, by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chimielski. I've read several books about L.A. and the San Fernando Valley in the past few months, after my backpack, including my laptop, got stolen. As a homeless blogger/artist, my online time got cut, I'm using library computers for now, and I had more time to do something. So I've read a lot about L.A. and The Valley. Binge Times, published in 2022, dove deep into the "streaming wars," the battle in the entertainment industry for viewership... and money, since Netflix, YouTube, and video streaming began pulling millions of eyeballs away from TV and movies, and cable TV systems, in particular. The book was incredibly well researched, and interesting, another major industry in transition, in today's world, something I've been writing about for years.
Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, I read chapter 15, which talked about the Peacock streaming service. The chapter was called, "If you want to grab their attention, you have to tease," a quote from L.A. billboard icon, Angelyne. There's a paragraph in the chapter about the feature Peacock did about Angelyne, which is what the video embedded above is plugging. Angelyne, herself, wasn't happy with the movie. Now, living in The San Fernando Valley, I've seen Angelyne's hot pink Corvette around a handful of times, at a distance. Reading the book where she's mentioned a couple of days ago, it brought her back into my consciousness.
The next day, Thanksgiving day, I wound up in a McDonald's in the afternoon, where my T-Day dinner was the $5 Meal Deal. Not epic, but it was a cool, mellow day, I didn't mind missing the whole traditional Thanksgiving feast. I was sitting there in the back, hanging out, and reading the final chapter of Binge Times, when a hot pink Corvette pulled up outside. Yep, Angelyne herself. She came in the restaurant, walked up to the counter, I think to ask of there was a restroom code, and then walked back to the ladies room. She walked right by me, three or four feet away. In all the years since I first saw an Angelyne billboard, over 35 years ago, it's the first time I've seen Angelyne up close. The first thing that grabbed me was how tiny she is. She's barely over 5 feet tall, maybe 5'2", I'd say. Yeah, she's top heavy, and had the intsense make-up, unique outfit, big blonde hair, and a pink veil over her face. But she's really small. Her image is so huge, I always thought she must be at least 5'9" if not a full six feet tall. But she's a actually quite petite woman, except for the boobs, of course.
As Angelyne was in the restroom, one woman ran out into the parking lot, and snapped a phone pic of the back of the pink Corvette, with the "Angelyn" license plate. Myself, I wondered if I should catch her attention, and tell her she was mentioned in the book I had in my hands. Hey, I'm a big, ugly, sketchy looking homeless guy, so I decided against it. I didn't want to freak her out. But I snapped a pic of her Corvette through the window. After taking care of things, and walked back past me, and out to her car.
What is it about Angelyne? I've worked on several TV shows, worked with the American Gladiators, hung out for a day shooting footage on a Tom Petty music video, and seen Dennis Rodman, Geena Davis, Charlton Heston, Gene Simmons,Diddy, Pamela Anderson,Ashlee Simpson, and the a capella singing group Pentatonix in the wild around SoCal. But seeing Angelyne up close, as a long time SoCal resident, is like a unicorn sighting. There's a weird mysteriousness to this real life, Barbie-like character. The odd little bit of synchronicity, actually reading a book she's mentioned, in when she rolled up, made it more memorable. That was my L.A. Thanksgiving, seeing Angelyne close-up in a McDonald's. Hey, it's weird out here. It's L.A., shit happens. That's why I'm here. It's a good place for us freaks, geeks, dorks, and weirdos.
Here's a real fight between male gorillas, in the wild, in Rwanda. We're humans, male silverback gorillas can weigh up to about 600 pounds (270 kilos), and are much stronger than us. There's a reason we have a saying "the 800 pound gorilla in the room," about huge issues we all ignore. This post is not about gorillas, it's about the economic realities of the next few years in the United States of America. But I'm starting this post with the economic "800 pound gorilla in the room."
We have far too much debt in our economic system. That's the huge issue everyone ignores on a daily basis. Nearly all average people have far more debt than they can handle. Home mortgage debt, student loan debt, auto loan debt, credit card debt. Businesses large and small also have huge debt loads in many, if not most cases. Local governments, villages, towns, cities, and counties, have debt issues. States have huge loads of debt. And yes, the United States of America now has over $36 trillion in debt, it just crossed to $36 T recently, according to the U.S. National Debt Clock, as I write this.
Not all debt is bad debt, debt allows us to buy houses we could never afford buy paying cash for, it allows us to buy newer and better cars, go to better colleges, and businesses routinely use short term debt to buy merchandise, while giving their buyers terms to pay for items sold, allowing a smoother flow of goods and services all around.
More important, the U.S. dollar is backed by debt, not gold, since 1971. We're over 50 years into the largest fiat money experiment in human history. Our entire economic system runs on debt. Our system NEEDS debt to keep functioning. But there's an amount of debt where things function smoothly, and an amount of debt where nearly everyone struggles to pay their bills, month to month, and everything slows down to a breaking point. We're in the latter, right now.
This country has an amount of debt that is dramatically slowing down consumer spending. Consumer spending makes up about 70% of the economy. This is the huge, underlying issue everyone is ignoring as we head into a new presidential administration that wants to make massive changes in many areas. Their game plan has largely been created by Right wing, highly religious, "conservatives." I put that word in quotation marks because they don't believe in conserving money like decades ago, they definitely aren't for conserving the environment, "conservative" in today's world seems to imply fundamentalist Christian social beliefs. Conservatives aren't really into "conserving" much of anything, except the status quo.
On January 20th, 2025 Donald Trump will be sworn in as president, a 78 1/2-year-old man who quite admittedly loves McDonald's French fries... and salt. But this post is about what life will be like for Americans in the next few years, not fundamentalist social views or Trump's health. In less than two weeks since the election, the stock indices hit new highs, and then dropped back quite a bit, and now are climbing higher. Gold dropped over $200 per ounce from its recent all time high, and is now bouncing back a bit. The U.S. dollar has surged higher, compared to other major currencies, which makes life and business harder for many other countries, including our allies. Despite having The Fed lower their Fed Funds rate 3/4% in the least couple months, overall interest rates have been trending up. The 10 Year U.S. Treasury, a common bookmark for interest rates is at 4.41% as I write this, a much higher return than through all of the 2010's.
While small and mid-sized business owners tend to lean Republican, and believe the economy will take off in a Trump presidency, in reality there are all kinds of mixed signals in the financial world, contradicting each other. Here are the major trends I see playing out now, and into the future months and years.
Inflation- Inflation has been trending down, from a high 9.1% CPI, to around 2.5% recently. Truflation, a wider, nearly realtime inflation indicator, got down to 1.01% annual inflation rate on September 13th, 2024, but has surged back up to 2.84% since. The investment world, the big players, see a Trump presidency likely to push inflation back up. That's a recent trend change, and has kept going up since the election, about two weeks ago. But there are major trends pushing overall inflation downward at the same time, particularly stagnant or dropping values in both commercial and residential real estate in some areas.
Consumers are broke-Advanced Auto Parts is the latest large business to announce mass store closings and layoffs because consumer sales are slowing, and everyday people are broke. McDonald's, Starbucks, and several other major corporations have been saying the same thing for about six months now. As I mentioned above, most consumers are saddled with high levels of debt these days, and working hard to pay day to day expenses and keep current on their various debt payments. Consumers spending is about 70% of the U.S. economy, and I see nothing coming in the next couple of years to change this issue. To increase consumer spending, either wages have to increase by an unprecedented amount, quickly, or TRILLIONS of dollars of some forms of debt need to be written off. I don't see either of these ideas as having a chance in Hell of happening anytime soon. This issue alone, broke consumers, makes the strongest case for a recession that has either started, or will start soon. We have been slowly, steadily dropping into a recession, and it would have happened either way, under a Harris or a Trump presidency. But how the government reacts and responds would be quite different.
Commercial real estate collapse- The collapse in prices of commercial buildings, across the U.S., has been going on for around a year now. Buildings worth tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars have been selling for up to 90% discounts, in some cases, for several months now. This is happening nationwide, to these large office buildings, along with many vacant retail stores and malls, which have been struggling for the last decade or more. Here's a 20 story building in Denver that recently sold at an 80% discount. One of the tallest buildings in Texas sold in May for more than a 90% discount. Here's an office building in San Francisco that sold for nearly 80% off of it's peak value. You get the idea, this isn't just happening in the few biggest major cities. The overall values of many retail stores, malls, and office buildings are dropping all over the country. Lower values mean lower tax incomes for cities, which means those cities will ultimately have to reduce services somewhere, to compensate. Like broke consumers, there is no quick fix to this problem, and it is a part of our transition out of the fading Industrial Age era and into the building Information Age society, which needs different types of buildings in different places. This trend will just have to play out over many years, probably two or three decades, just like the closure of factories did in the late 1970's through the 2000's.
Residential real estate slowing down- In this video by Nick at Reventure Consulting (from mid-November 2024), he shows multiple homes that have dropped tens of thousands in value, to a $400,000 loss in a home's value in one case, over the last two or three years. Much of Florida's residential real estate, in particular, is turning down quickly right now. I think most of us know that home prices vary tremendously across the United States right now. For example, the median home price is now $1.2 million in Los Angeles, California. Yet, there are cities that have gone downhill in recent decades, mostly from the loss of factories and high paying manufacturing jobs. There are many areas where homes are for sale for incredibly low prices.
I won't pick on the well known cities of Detroit, Michigan, Gary, Indiana, or Youngstown, Ohio, which are known for these issues. Here's a house for sale for $59,900 in Mansfield, Ohio, where my grandparents lived until I finished 8th grade. I spent a lot of time in Mansfield as a kid, going to the now closed Richland Mall, playing on my grandparents' swing set, and getting yelled at by my drunk German grandpa. Mansfield was a thriving Midwest industrial city when I was a kid, in the 1970's. Now, like most of rural, small town, and mid-sized city America, it's struggling. There are probably 150 or 200 mid-sized and small cities in the U.S. that have been struggling since the early 1980's, and Mansfield is just one of them. If all these towns and cities really had the potential for large numbers of people move in and live really well, Americans would flood back into those cities. If that happened, new businesses would rise up in those towns and cities, and the overall real estate prices would rise in those places, and even out across the country. But that is not what's happening, over the long run. Though the pandemic reversed the migration flows for two or three years, the long term trend is that Americans, overall continue to migrate to the larger metro areas.
These are just three of the really big, long term trends, that are playing out now, and will continue well into the future, regardless of what President-elect Trump, or any other politicians do. Trump's much trumpeted ideas for tariffs could easily lead to higher prices and more inflation, or a full blown trade war with China, neither of which helps working Americans.
Yes, stock prices, and particularly crypto prices, are rising right now, which helps the relatively small number of Americans who own large stock portfolios. But stocks are largely overvalued overall by long term standards, which is why people like Warren Buffet, one of America's best investors, have been selling large quantities of stocks, and is now sitting on over $320 billion in cash. He is waiting for good opportunities to invest large sums, and can't find them at this time.
There are huge negative trends economically right now, and some very positive trends in some markets, and these mixed signals will most likely continue well into the next year or two. Future actions by the new administration will have some effect on the economy, and we'll have to see how the overall picture plays out. But it's not going to be smooth sailing, or the unbounded upward trend that most Republicans are now expecting. Finding true organic growth in the economy at a large level has been a problem since the Great Recession (aka the GFC) of 2008. It's going to be a weird and tumultuous road ahead economically, and some actions by the Trump administration could make it worse for average Americans.
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I've been doing most of my writing on a platform called Substack for the last year, which is designed specifically for writers. Check it out:
This is my latest Sharpie Scribble Style drawing, motorcycle racer Kenny Roberts, known to many as "King Kenny." This is another project given to me by Sean Ewing, a lifelong BMX and motorcycle enthusiast and rider, and a guy who I've done several really cool drawings for. Sharpie markers on paper, 18" X 24",about 45 hours of work, #sharpiescribblestyle, November 2024.
Kenny Roberts rose up in California to become a great flat track motorcycle racer on the dirt tracks as a young man. He moved on up to road racing, got sponsored by Yamaha, and was the first guy to touch his knee to the ground while leaning into turns. In the late 1970's and early 1980's. Kenny went on to become the first American World Champion at road racing, long dominated by the Europeans at the time. Then he won the World Championship a second year in a row. Check the videos below for footage and the story of Kenny Roberts.
The mummy of a three week old saber tooth kitten was found in 2020, frozen in the Siberian permafrost. This find just hit the news yesterday. In this video above, a real paleontologist gives us some background on Homotherium, which did live here in the U.S., among other places around the world. But the mummified kitten was a Homotherium, not the more famous Smilodon, the saber tooth cat with the 9 inch canine teeth. According to this video, Homotherium were part cat-like and part dog-like, and built for distance running. Check out the video for more details on this extinct animal. I believe this is the first mummified saber toothed cat ever found, which is amazing.
