I love how every bit of bad news at the moment can be blamed on the credit crunch. Its as though in response to any piece of bad news you can just shrug and shake your head and say “its the credit crunch” as if that explains everything.
I could turn to someone and say my dog died yesterday, not that I even have a dog and wouldn’t be surprised if the response was that very same sad shake of the head and they would just say “credit crunch”.
But then I think about it, and redundancies aside, people of my age should not really be noticing much of a real financial difference except that things are a bit more expensive. Very few of my friends are yet in the sorry position of having a morgage and/or children and aside from the fact that I can’t seem to get a full time job, the rest of them are still gainfully employed. Even despite their lack of misfortune there seems to be this gloomy cloud that hangs over everything.
Why is this the case? Could the media and the internet be to blame for the exinction of fun? I think that last time there was a recession – I was quite a bit younger and not inclined to worry about such things, but this time around there seems to be so much news and such constant updates: people’s homes being reposessed, ad revenue declines, companies going bankrupt, banks going bust that it’s hard to go out and spend money or be outrageous and have fun while maintaining a good conscience. I was reading a B2B magazine this morning and virtually every story had a small paragraph about how that particular niche was coping (or not) in ‘this tough financial climate’.
But the thing is, the relatively affluent mid-twenty demographic are probably less affected by the recession as they have fewer financial and personal commitments. If consumer spending is part of the problem, why not try to convince those guys that it’s still ok to go to Oxford Street and blow a couple of hundred quid on the latest pair of jeans or trainers. The present alternative scares them into thinking that the sky is falling and the apocalypse is on its way, and will result in more people losing their jobs.