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It was busy in town on Sunday as I did the classic man thing of trying to get all of my shopping done in 45 minutes.

Lots and lots of people, mulling around, buying and consuming.

It looked to me on seeing the faces of all of the people around to at least half of them looked like they did not want to be there.

Spending money on stuff that they didn’t want, out of some sort of sense of duty to Christmas.

“Lives of quiet desperation”.

It seems though, that all is not well, despite the Christmas lights and the choirs and the market in the centre of the square selling all manners of crap and fat.

Just a hundred yards from the market there are boarded up shops, there are “to let” signs and windows that are opaque by that paint that they use where you cannot see the mess left behind.

One street back and it is worse, the back sides of these shops, some of which look good on the front, some not so good, are terrible and the boarded-up shops increased dramatically.

Even in the main shopping centre there are empty shops.

It wasn’t always like this.

Perhaps it was and my perception is at a low ebb, but it seems like we are pretending.

Running out of money. Not able to keep up with the responsibility we have to keep up.

A couple of weeks ago I started to chat to people about how their work was doing, some are doing ok, but many have noticed what the newspapers are not saying and that people are stopping spending money.

People are holding off and waiting because of elections and Brexit and other things as well.

The propaganda machine says that everything is ok and that consumer spending is up by 8.5% and that “consumer spending is up 0.05% and we are moving towards modest growth”.

Guy on the street says otherwise, at least to me.

It starts at the top, one of my friend's who works at a major printing company says that their sales are down by 33% because the corporations are not spending.

They hold off and wait, they don’t spend on accounts and they don’t spend on staff.

The staff have less money so they spend on less and then the people that sell things have less money because the staff have less money to spend.

It takes a while for this to filter out but the man on the street knows it earlier than anybody else.

It is time to baton down the hatches.

It might be a cold winter, for longer than just winter.

Blog Post Number - 2217