One-Click Shopping on Hold

A friend today was regaling us with her tale of misadventures with Amazon.com and her credit card. She concluded—and summarized--this shaggy dog of a story in a despairing tone: “And now, I have no One-Click Shopping!” Perhaps the story of all of us, all over the world. We have run into a loss of our one-click shopping. And now what?

On one of the internet groups I belong to where you trade artist trading cards, the members were all announcing that they’re never going to buy any more art supplies, that they have enough to last them until their deaths, that all they are dealing in nowadays is real needs, not just wants. I felt like I had fallen into a group-therapy experience. Or maybe an AA meeting. There was a lot of confessing of bad behavior and promises never to do it again.

I look back at that long line of refrigerators at the local dump, all X-ed out (as if for execution as another friend noted), and wonder if they are there because of one-click shopping. Buying errors? “What was I thinking? How could I have bought a harvest gold/avacado refrigerator?” How indeed. Or are they all lined up there awaiting disposal because they failed to be sufficiently energy efficient for those who need to save the earth? How many new refrigerators could Point Roberts possibly need in, say, any given year? Surely not that many (the picture includes only half of the death row group).

This is all a very mysterious time, I think. I can’t at all make out whether we are all watching the end of the world as we know it, or a movie of the end of the world as we know it. Does our collective (Western) future hold the ocean at my doorstep, an ocean currently a half mile and 180 feet away from and below me? Or gasoline at $50/gallon? Or food riots? Or is it just that everyone will have to give up their private gym memberships and instead walk briskly around the block where the rest of us can look at them when they feel a need for movement? Cook something when they feel hungry rather than ordering out or going out to restaurants? What’s really there at the fork in the road ahead, just over the top of that hill? Can't see yet.

It is clear that there is a big up-tick in rentals here on the Point since Christmas; most of them long-term, not just before summer stuff. Many houses for sale at high prices, but the realtors are urging that people make offers, strongly implying that owners will accept considerably less than the stated price. I guess we will all get to stay tuned for this.

Have All the Workers Gone?

My conversation with the real estate agent on the Sunshine Coast also included a foray into the rental market. I wasn’t interested in renting anything, on either end of a rental transaction, but I was interested in why there suddenly were so many rentals on the market and thought he might have some knowledgeable insight into that question.

To my surprise, he thinks that it largely represents renters leaving the Coast. That is, the rental market here is always tight because there aren’t a lot of rental units, and the ones that are here are quickly re-rented by word of mouth, so you never see them in the papers. But, he adds, workers on the Sunshine Coast are here largely to work to the needs of the retiree population. That is, as in Point Roberts, retirees are the main population driver here on the Coast. The workers come to serve the retirees’ needs, whether those be for new houses, remodeling of houses, landscaping, yardwork, or general house maintenance, as well as non-house, personal needs. When the retirees begin to take a major hit with their investment portfolios, they stop their discretionary spending. Won’t remodel the bathroom just now, or redecorate the living room, or build that little shop out back, or build a water feature in the garden, buy new shoes, etcetera.

When they stop that, the jobs that all the renters were occupying begin to slow down, dry up, or just end. And so the worker/renters move on to someplace else where jobs are more plentiful. Nice to live on the Coast, but it’s possible to live elsewhere. So they pick up and leave, but now there’s not that ready supply of renters to fill their shoes. And rental units begin to be advertised in droves in the papers.

Down south in Vancouver, of course, there’s still a lot of spending going on for the Olympics (they just announced another $700 million need for security, after last month’s $700 million need for finishing the Olympic Village, which latter the Vancouver City Council took on). But construction down there is beginning to slow too, with yesterday the announcement of the end of a planned skyscraper-hotel-shopping complex on Georgia St. Instead of 40+ stories decorating the city, it will be decorated with a big hole in the ground on one of its main streets. And of course, whatever needs to be done for the Olympics will be done a year from now. So, I guess renters move on from there, too, eventually.

So, does this tell me anything about Point Roberts? Probably not, since I’m not sure there’s a large pool of workers/renters serving that retiree population—that is, a large enough pool that one would notice a change if one is one of the retirees rather than one of the workers.

And also, we awoke to about 2-3 inches of snow on the ground this morning. Cold awakenings all around us.

Starting to Say Goodbye

We met today with a real estate agent about selling our house up here in British Columbia. We bought it almost 20 years ago, and we have had a wonderful time living here, even if only part time, but even as all good things must come to an end, so must our transiting back and forth between countries. My simplest way of explaining this is getting out while the getting is good, by which I mean while we still can manage to do it with our wits and bodies reasonably unimpaired and with both of us still here to participate. Another way to put it is that maintaining multiple properties is getting to be too much of a chore. But however it is put, it needs to be put, and thus the meeting.

The agent we called is the same guy who was our agent when we bought the house: he was then in his forties and we were in our fifties; now he is in his sixties and we in our seventies. That’s the nature of time and arithmetic, I guess, but we had not seen one another for maybe 16 years, so it was surprising to find (to our eyes) that he was just as he was then; and he kindly offered us the same assessment. And then we got down to business.

You can pretty much tell how the economy is up here by how carefully, how gently he approached us. Clearly, he is used to having to deliver bad news to people. The kind of bad news that is phrased like, “I know you could have sold your house for a zillion dollars last year, but this year, maybe a trillion less, in any case a lot less. It’s a very bad market right now and we just don’t see it getting better for awhile.” We were not, of course, surprised to hear this, but apparently many people are as he brought us a lot of paper to demonstrate how prices were falling in B.C. generally.

Not being able to get an argument from us about how bad things are (he assured us he’d been through four ups and four downs…but then how much longer do we any of us have to see any more of that roller coast ride?), we progressed to introducing him (again) to the house. Walking around in it, explaining all the things we loved about it—both its inherent qualities and things we had changed to make it even more wonderful (at least to us)—I was struck by how much I admired it as a house, how much I had enjoyed living here, how much I still anticipate, each return trip, seeing the great opening to light that one experiences when entering the house…like walking into the sky through a tree. And also how willing I was to let it go. It has always seemed to me a house that owns itself and that I had been lucky enough to travel with for awhile. Time now to find its next traveling partners. Somewhere out there, some terrifically lucky family are eating dinner without a clue as to what an amazing house is right there in their future. This year, next year, I guess we'll meet them.