My wife and I went to Sam's Wholesale Club Sunday and bought our weekly allotment of fruit. Sam's has, in our opinion, the best fruit in Tulsa, Okla., and we like fruit for breakfast.
There were more people milling the aisles than I've seen for a while, since maybe late in 2007. One family balanced a 37-inch high-definitionTV on a cart, among other purchases, followed by another family with an identical cart and, coincidentally, the same big-screen television set on board. The big carts — not the lowly grocery carts but the wood-platform ones with big wheels and tires — were common in the cashier lines. People were buying not just food and staples; they were buying nonperishables and manufactured goods, besides the TVs. Shoppers needed the big carts.
Is this happening in your stores? So much of our economy is dependent on shoppers — the shopping thigh-bone is connected to the manufacturing hip-bone, so to speak. It was nice to see the buying activity. It was different.
Funny, isn't it? A part of us wants to see saving continue; however, the economy needs a jolt of conspicuous consumption.
Signs for an improving market — the "green shoots" I keep writing about — seem to be more present, although I suspect this bull will have a correction or two along its path.
Drum Day
I stopped for an hour or so at Drum Day on Sunday. Drum Day is a charitable program that began in Tulsa some years ago and has spread to other communities. You have not experienced noise until you've heard hundreds of drummers playing the same beat at the same time.
