Outside of the unique circumstances of covid, we've never had, to my knowledge, a notable downturn when social media, and all the chatter it generates, has been so prominent or mass engaged. How much of it is just internet noise vs canary in the coal mine stuff. Who knows? But curious to find out in coming months/year
And yes I believe this time it's going to be different. I believe that if the economy dumps again, we are really going to see more hot wars. It is different from 2001, and different from 2008. We have kicked the can for almost 20 years and I kudos the policy makers who managed to achieve this.
I tell the younger generation the same thing. Save, invest, max 401k, before you go off and party. Your older self will thank you.
So you read nothing about how graduates during 2008 pretty much had forever stunted careers?
They aren't put on the streets, but it's clear some very long term damage is being done to people simply as a matter of bad luck.
https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/77/4/78...
>> Across a generation’s life course, early-life advantages are magnified through disparate occupational and social trajectories that lead to wide late-life disparities in financial and health resources, in a process first termed by Crystal and Shea as one of “cumulative advantage and disadvantage” (CAD; Crystal, 1982, 1986, 2020; Crystal et al., 1992, 2017; Crystal & Shea, 1990b; Dannefer, 1987, 1988). Dannefer (1987) described the trend of increasing inequality over the life course as the “Matthew effect,” applying a biblical dictum first used by Merton (1968), stating that “to he who has much, more is given, and to he who has little, even that is taken.” This ongoing process has also been described as an “obdurate tendency” for increasing inequality over the life course (Dannefer, 2020).
Myself included. Graduated in '08, had to work various minimum wage jobs in retail for several years because no one was hiring. I'm just now at a point in my career, nearing 40, where I should have been at 28.
Degree doesn't matter much when your only work experience is 5 years of working at Starbucks, and you barely have personal projects because you're too busy working 2 jobs to just to survive.
Those of us who suffered through that time period barely recovered, and many didn't recover at all. It shaped an entire generation.
it was a horrible period and I have many friends who are in the same boat especially those not in software
Cause garbage in, gets garbage out. With AI models being all the more rage in the coming years, unexperienced hires will prove many times more costly. (10x garbage with agents).
So companies are going to concentrate their worker base even more with experienced folks. They need fewer of them. Yes. But quality matters more than ever.
I really feel bad for the new graduates. For no fault of their own, the bar went up so high. Unless they’re a child prodigy doing some coding projects on the side since the age of 10 - no one will hire them. So how will they ever gain the experience they need?
Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see a reinvention of coding schools - that will now focus on fundamental and industry knowledge - imparted by other veterans, instead of teaching applied skills.
We’re not going to convince anyone to keep hiring software developers.
I think we ought to be keeping people trained and employed but it seems we’re not on the winning side here.
I never understood this sentiment. We don't have a massive manual weaving industry anymore, 95%+ of people used to be farmers in 1900. Tech comes and replaces humans, and the transition can be extremely painful especially for the people replaced, but ultimately it's better than keeping people artificially employed in obsolete jobs.
(I don't think SWE will be obsolete, but even in this case I'd rather switch careers)
But yeah, new graduates is going to suffer anyway.
And I'm scared of the collapse of the existing world order. Maybe we won't see a turn around for many years if it does collapse -- and we are already seeing many cracks on it.
Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management.
If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us.
It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI.
None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat.
Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower.
The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment.
Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away.
Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.
My theory: We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We are living through a nasty correction. AI is moving the needle too, but it’s mostly being used as a scapegoat to save face and explain away cleaning up failed ZRIP yolo plans that didn’t pan out.
We’ve also haven’t had a serious recession since 2009. It feels like it’s only a matter of time :(
"This time it's different."
20 years ago China and India had a nascent tech industry. Now they're booming.
Talented folks all over the world - Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere - are working on hard problems.
> We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest.
We did. This has had a tremendous impact, no doubt. But by the same coin, ZIRP has had half a decade to unwind at this point. There's other stuff going on. Tariffs, continued inflation, etc.
We're not the only industry offshoring. Hollywood has moved a lionshare of production overseas in the last 4 years. Graphics design and marketing... It's being shipped out at volume.
I was told that once video conferencing got good and internet and infrastructure became better in other places, "this time it will be different."
I was told once universities in other countries started pumping out a pool of great candidates, expats who worked for FAANGs in the US would go home to found their own companies using that pool, and those companies would take over the world. "this time it's different."
I was told during covid once everyone was remote, why would people not just hire the cheapest remote workers going forward? "This time it's different."
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely have seen more and more offshoring over time, but there's a huge inertia behind the US tech industry that's hard to change. The VC / startup ecosystem and all of it's resources have huge Bay Area inertia - it mostly hasn't even spread to the rest of the US, let alone the rest of the world, despite the cost of living and constrained talent pool in the Bay Area. There's something about getting a bunch of people with the same mindset in one spot and having them know each other, socialize with each other, make friends and networks with each other that still matters. Founders tend to build off the people and connections they know and are connected with personally.
I'm hoping it will take long enough to change for me to finish my career. We'll see. This time really may be different :).
EDIT: p.s. Agree totally it's way to complex to tell what's actually happening. The _impact_ of the end of ZRIP, the rise of AI, major tax changes on R&D amortization, and US tariffs pretty much landed at the same time, so who knows?
a) getting really good at clarifying requirements
b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.
This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.
Many juniors can't even meet with a human interviewer. There's no point maximizing for interviews that never come. That's the issue.
>This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas:
This seems to agree with the issue. a team of 100 becomes a team of 5 locals and 95 outsourced work. Maybe those 5 managers are better off, but we're still reducing the local workforce by 95%.
And I doubt the conditions of the remaining 5 are better than pre-outsourcing. You can't out-compensate burnout and QoL. Gen Z in particular seems to really be pushing against this mentality, so this strategy is limited in time even if it's working on Gen X/Millenials.
Junior engineers, i.e. people who have already been hired, can indeed fight back by getting really good at their jobs.
But you're right, it doesn't help you get hired if you can't even get an interview.
That was the bottleneck in the industry when it was in growth phase, it's a mature sector now and it's all about efficiency and profit now. Speed to market and product iteration speed isn't the most important thing anymore, there's not a lot of innovation taking place. Outside the actual novel AI specific companies out there, of course, there are a few other spots of growth and exceptional companies but largely the kings have been crowned.
I'm genuinely curious.
I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand.
Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output.
From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now.
We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
I use to need myself to lead the project, customer management, design work and some development. I would add usually another developer to do some of the grunt work coding and usually a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure as code, security, etc.
Not that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do it all myself, I just didn’t have time. GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK (ie using a high level language like Typescript instead of Yaml) and can do the code where I really don’t need two other resources or deal with the detailed requirements and coordination.
Before the pearl clutching starts about my not knowing how to code without AI. I’ve been coding consistently since 1986 when I was a hobbyist assembly language coder.
> We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
It seems to be working…
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
Given the vibes of the community here: I guess I'll look for a Mad Max mask (I'll ofc keep performing my civic duties, though).
What would banning stock buybacks accomplish? Companies can still return capital to shareholders in the form of dividends.
Stock buybacks are designed to let the shareholder see the same upside, but decide when to take the taxable event. Long term gains are also preferable to non-qualified dividends.
If you're an entrepreneur or VC, you want big tech broken up because they can put serious price pressure on your exit.
Trillion dollar companies can easily spin up a team to copy you, with no incentive to stay alive. They can threaten you with all kinds of leverage - access to customers, patents, legislators. They can give you an ultimatum to sell for cheap, go to your competitor, etc.
Their scale and reach is additional unexpected gravity on your delta V.
Capitalism is supposed to be hard. It isn't supposed to support invasive species that can graze anywhere they please and kill ecosystems of diversity and innovation. These mega conglomerates can just throw themselves into markets using unrelated business unit profit and suffocate real companies.
Breaking up Google and Amazon would be good for everyone, perhaps even shareholders and ICs at those companies themselves if value is unlocked. Let alone all of the other companies and entrepreneurs in the market.
What makes you think people in Asia wouldn’t benefit from more competition in the market as well?
That said - I feel that advertisement based markets will always consolidate. There is too much of a benefit to having a single network which has the largest reach in terms of audience to show ads. This will always create incentives to consolidate over time.
Then again, why make the perfect the enemy of the good. Getting to more competition is a good step.
If someone is trying to sell themselves as an undifferentiated developer in 2025 or later, it’s going to be an uphill battle unless you can lean on your network.
At 51, if my only differentiator is I can code, I’ve done something horribly wrong in my life.
Anecdotally, I found software development adjacent roles quickly when I was looking both last year and the year before.
Someone joining now on the other hand, might have to resort to physical work at some point in the next ten years of things go south.
There's always a race to the bottom. I don't think it's a big leap to suggest that what's considered the "minimum viable product" has decreased over the years. It's also no secret that software is getting worse.
As to salaries, I think you forgot how things worked before. The reason companies like Google introduced free food and all the incentives was because increasing salaries was not a better way to attract better talent, since salaries were already high. So either now something has changed where better talent cares more about money or we're attracting talent that cares more about money. As in either the same people changed or we're attracting a different type of person. Personally, regardless of age, regardless of field, I've seen a strong correlation with the best people not caring as much about money. Once the salary is good then they care more about how interesting the work is or how they can reduce stress in their life. Money matters, but it has decreasing utility as it grows.
In 2016, I knew I had to do something when my (step)son graduated in 2020 and my wife was willing to move anywhere the money took us.
It just so happened that a job fell into my lap at AWS working (full time) in the consulting department. I am no longer there. I now work at a third party consulting firm as a staff consultant specializing in app dev.
I looked at the statistics[1], and while you could argue new graduates have seen worse (recent grad unemployment is actually lower than much of the 2010s), you can also see that in contrast to previous periods where new grad unemployment is lower than all worker unemployment, this time around new grad unemployment is actually slightly higher. However if you look at the chart this wasn't a post pandemic phenomena. The gap has been closing since the back half of the 2010s, and doesn't show much of a spike after the release of chatgpt, so "AI" isn't a good explanation either.
[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market
Of course you also need to look at underemployment too. Which CS is on the lower end of that. So you have to consider things like that even though there's a higher unemployment rate than performing arts (2x) there is far lower underemployment because people expect to get jobs in their field for CS.
There's more you need to look at too. It's not so easy and you shouldn't just use such a high level approximation if you want to make sense of the data.
Hiring lab has some more interesting information to like the number of postings. CS is way down from "prepandemic" levels, but unfortunately only goes to 2020 (hence the quotes).
TL;DR Gen Z is "slightly better off" in pure financial status compared to older generations , even with inflation adjusted. But the distribution on what got cheaper overtime and what got more expensive is causing the true strain among Gen Z.
It also helps to explain a bit of a generation clash when you see how older generations can chastise the younger ones over what were "luxuriies" when they were that age. The entire market is flipped.
However, engineers in developing countries will work half your wage, remote from their home, where that's a great salary where they live. When the average annual salary in India is the equivalent of $4,200 USD/year, there are a lot of talented engineers there that if they don't win the H1B lottery, will end up working for big tech remote.
The numbers we do have show significantly worse jobs numbers compared to prior years.
We might get data again, maybe not, but the US government has had an internal revolution, and it's doubtful we will have data as good as in the past, and it's quite likely that any bad news will be deeply buried.
I see that Tokyo stock markets are way down today, that's probably what's driving lower BTC?
Edit: Add to the above that companies like Walmart are seeing an uptick in high wage earners becoming their customers, and McDonalds seeing a shrinking population of low-wage customers.
It’s easy to infer the rest from there. People who used to do well are cutting expenses and those who were already struggling are..I seriously don’t know what they’re doing. Where do you eat when you downgrade from McDonalds..Wendy’s? It’s a sad state of affairs.
Source: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-16/mcdonalds-...
You buy groceries. And if you must downgrade from there you eat the rich.
There are some fresh fruits and vegetables that are exceptions because they dont take well to refrigeration or freezing but really not much.
IMO, I think it breaks even, but eating out saves a lot of time! Healthier cooking at home? Yes. I studied this for myself (N=1), and my cooking is about US$10/meal give or take (asparagus, chicken, rice, water to drink). If you cook for two or more people, then I think cooking at home comes out ahead financially.
The Titanic had 3 days of warning and took 3 hours to sink. A large ship takes a long time to do anything, be it turn or drown.
If you've been following the breadcrumbs in pretty much any industry (especially tech), you know the market isn't in a good shape. If you're looking outside expencting to see the world burning, you gotta wait another 3 hours (or hope someone steps in first).
I don't know that the official data shows things "still bobbing along." The graph of monthly employment numbers looks like it has a decidedly downward trend overall. September jobs were unexpectedly high, but we've had a lot of subsequent downward revisions and it may happen again for September.
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2025/11/2...
Nothing paints a picture of recession in reality right now.
I work in games and have the occasional slump. But this time is much different. all staffind agencies for temp work in my city pretty much said there's nothing out there. my local area is pretty much a bunch of fractional janitorial roles and that's it.
Is this saying something more about the relative expectation of compensation bands?
New grads are unlikely to have a comparable benchmark.
People who've worked in Big Tech and finding themselves applying to regular companies where the revenue per employee is in the $200k range are likely going to have difficulty adjusting to such.
I work in the public sector and make very low six digits. Others I know have compensation that is 3x or 4x what I make while working in technology industries.
If both I and the people I chat with were to find themselves suddenly out of a job, I suspect I'd find an acceptable job elsewhere more easily than they would because anything I did would be a pay raise while anything they took would be a pay cut. This in turn translates to that I would be the less risky candidate (that I wouldn't be looking for a new position that would pay more within the year)... and thus I believe not only would I be more likely to accept the job I would also be more likely to be extended the position.
Browsing reddit there are a lot of people on cscareerquestions (and similar) who have the mindset of FAANG or bust as a new grad. That they wouldn't even consider working at a company like Little Cesar's or Home Depot despite those companies having open positions.
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Furthermore, this gets into a lemon market situation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons ). Where it becomes harder to distinguish a good candidate for a poor one and that can only be found out after someone is hired, the companies that have people are more afraid of hiring a lemon than so don't hire anyone. This further depresses the market for the highly skilled candidates. Additionally, people who are skilled are less likely to look for a new job because the market is depressed and they're not as likely to get a good position afterwards.
I just want to survive and I can do barely that. If you want a reference: I'm a single male who went from 160k salary to nothing in the last half of 2023. My necessary expenses were 3k a month (70% of that being rent).
Since then I lived in 2024 off of 50/hr freelance @ 15 hours a week. or... 3000/month. You see the issue here. Savings got obliterated, credit built up. But I figured I'd pay it off quickly if I just got any job to supplement the freelance work. not a 160k job per se. I could have found some local 60k IT role and been just fine (if a bit overworked with two different jobs).
In 2025, after a year of circuses in the job market I settled on a 20/hr 20 hour role to supplement the freelance work. So things are "stable" now... as long as I don't get sick, or the car doesn't break down, or a variety of other life factors (spoilers: I did in fact get sick. Which lead to me finding the 2nd part time work).
Like I said, I just want to survive. As is, I'm working for a third or so of my old salary with zero benefits and much more stress.
Salary-wise, I'm making less than I did when I lived in California in '09 (and that's salary - stocks were a nice bit more and public sector doesn't exactly have an ESPP).
It may be necessary to move to get a job that pays $80k a year with 100% in the office expectations. Yes, it sucks. It's hard. Finding a job in '09 was not fun and I expect that similar conditions are to be found today. However, there are jobs out there when one considers what would be D tier companies and presents themself as someone isn't going to leave in a year for a higher salary somewhere else (before the implicit ROI of onboarding has been paid off). With the prevalence of job hopping and the "this resume does not match the applicant" issues, companies have become very risk adverse.
I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week and let me tell you, they have a major systems problem that is making their operations look like a joke
>I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week
And yet you still go to Home Depot, so from their perspective it's not an existential issue. Probably the biggest thing companies have learned recently is that they don't need 99.99% uptime, people will accept degraded performance because "that's just how technology works".
Everyone competes on price, so when I see everyone at Home Depot with their thumbs up their asses because the computers are down, I know that Ashby is eating their lunch on the margin. I'm sure Home Depot has enormous economies of scale that make up for it, but this is a current issue.
From looking over the shoulders of the staff, some aspects of the system that I've seen as a supplier are directly visible to them too.
Offshoring is by far the biggest culprit. Plenty of Jr/Mid roles hiring…but not US based.
Then in 1996, he wrote “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.”
The software industry is extremely fad-driven. During the pandemic, the fad was to hire programmers. That created a lot of busywork and coordination jobs that didn’t contribute to the bottom line.
Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running. So the trend became “cut the fat.” In fairness, there actually was fat to cut.
Now boards are in cost-cutting mode and fantasizing about AI, so the pendulum has swung back towards offshoring. But that cost-cutting focus is going to lead to stagnation and self-cannibalization. Somebody’s going to buck the trend, have a splashy success, and the herd will trample back in the other direction.
Yes. But sadly, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
And I feel there's going to be a huge storm to survive first. I imagine many may not even make it to the next shift.
I'm not sure you can give credit to Musk here. Buying a company and cutting all R&D to "juice" profits isn't his invention. Twitter is really around still in spite of his efforts as opposed to because of them; other CEOs might be doing layoffs but they're also not going out doing sieg heils. As well as he really fired them for fealty reasons and not economic ones.
It should be very telling that Grok came out of X.ai and not X. Ultimately, Musk did have to reverse some of the layoffs although with a bit of slight of hand so that Twitter could release any sort of new products.
I'm not your typical HN member I don't think. I've been a computer nerd since I was 14 years old. I come here to stimulate my inner nerd.
I am always curious about people who are strongly oriented towards one thing (computing) but somehow wind up in another area, such as construction.
The management company my mother and I worked for sent me to various classes over the next several years (electrical, plumbing, HVAC and pool maintenance) and my supervisor was an old HVAC tech. I learned a ton from him. By the time I was 22 or so, I was promoted to maintenance director.
I got bored with apartments and wanted more. I started doing side work and met a lady that owned lots of rental property. That opened doors and she introduced me to other investors. Eventually, I was able to leave the apartment industry and do my own thing. It just kind of blew up from there.
As far as your construction related ideas, just put yourself out there. Meet people in the industry. Go to local industry related events. See if the city you live in has real estate investor clubs. DFW has a few and it's a great opportunity to meet people. This is also a great way to pick up work. Rent houses are always needing things repaired or replaced.
I know Mueller metal buildings is always looking for sales people. They were even looking for an IT person not too long ago too. In the rural area of Texas I'm in, we finish out lots of them and seem to becoming more and more popular in recent years.
You didn’t experience a slowdown at the height of the recession circa 2008?
- out of college it took 3 months to find work. It sucked, took over 100 apps, but I found a nice project.
- after that project ended, 3 more months (but less stressful because I had more than one role I was interviewing with).
- Then layoffs, another 3 months in 2022 where it was very competitive (I was in at least 4-5 interview pipelines before my first choice accepted my offer).
- Then that studio quickly shuttered and I haven't found anything full time in 2.5 years. Freelancing kept me up until that wasn't enough, and then I found some non-tech part time work.
working harder than ever with 2 jobs + more portfolio work to prepare for interviews despite having 9 years of experience now. This feels worse than the horror stories I'd hear when finding my first job.
Certainly less pay but I love being outside and walking.
And no Jira, changing the color of that button, or steeping myself in Frank’s eldritch horror code.
If I was trying to attract intelligent applicants looking for work outside of software engineering, that would be in the headline.
Not officially, but once you remove the skills required for the tasks, it's not all that different.
The h1b people spend (most) of their salary in the USA and pay US income taxes. Whereas overseas labor spend their salary over seas and pay no US taxes.
We do not seem to be technically experiencing stagflation,ir really either half of it, on a national scale, as we appear to still be in a weak aggregate economic expansion and inflation, while higher than the 2% target, is fairly mild at around a 3% annualized rate [0], and, in any case, stocks going up is not inflation (unqualified inflation, which is the inflation part of stagflation, in consumer price inflation, not asset value inflation.)
OTOH, we are in a very weak economy especially outside of the leading AI firms, and there are quite likely both wide regions and wide sectors of the economy which, considered alone, would be in recession, and while inflation is fairly mild, it is high for the last couple decades and being in near-recession conditions. So, for a lot of people, the experience is a something like stagflation (and there are lots of signs that the economic slowdown will continue alongside rising inflation.)
[0] though as economic statistics are only available after the fact, either of these could have changed, but the real defining period for “stagflation” in the US is the 1973-1975 recession, years which saw a minimum of 6.2% inflation (the term was actually coined in the UK for conditions which saw a massive drop in GDP growth rate, fron 5.7% annually to 2.1% in successive years, but not an actual recession, alongside 4.8% inflation.)
Black Friday sales set records and it not even cyber Monday. If Americans are languishing then shouldn’t holiday spending be down?
I'd not be surprised if a good number of people did the same. PLUS, the prices rose by quite a bit between the start of the year and now. So we need to see if this increase is sales match up to inflation (which, unfortunately, would be more difficult to rely on knowing that that metric has become politicized.)
This year was prescription glasses.
not bf related but happened this week: 1) cv axles for my car ~500 and will install myself
i am employed and just make it into 6 figures $110k, which apparently is poverty level now if you have a few dependents. i consider myself fortunate.
Not necessarily a bad thing…but not great either.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-29/black-fri...
Most population growth was due to immigration for a while, and immigration (for obvious reasons in 2025) is way, way down.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-us-population-could-shri...
what's your report?
>you'd have to nuke LA
Let's not give this administration ideas, please.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POPTHM its source being https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/pi0825.pdf
Also poor people can get into debt they are still poor. Maybe they can afford a nintendo switch but not afford to raise a family.
Edit there is talk below of inflation adjusted numbers being high but meh
Rich indeed!
Can't see how this positive feedback loop gets us to a bad place at all!
What was the historical trend? Otherwise you can't draw much from just "49.2%" alone, aside from a vague sense that stuff should be fairer.
No, it is not normal for 10% of the coountry to power half the spending. Just think about that statistic for a second. Spending includes groceries, services, and other continual needs. A few private jets can't outspend millions of people buying food.
But here's your chart: https://preview.redd.it/2pcvmm0u3jpf1.png?width=798&auto=web...
While there isn't a definitive inflation-adjusted per-capita number for 2025, recent data indicates that overall sales growth was outpaced by inflation, meaning consumers likely bought fewer items. Total Black Friday spending was up, but the average number of items purchased declined. For instance, Salesforce reported total spending was up 3% but order volume was down 2%, with average selling prices climbing 7%.
...
Per-capita sales: The increase in spending is largely driven by higher prices, meaning the actual volume of goods purchased per person likely decreased compared to the previous year, even with higher total spending, says The New York Times.
Inequality is very visible in terms of what sort of consumption occurs. Gotta look at the qualitatives.
The retired middle class boomers I know are completely outside the business cycle.
While I don't think they have enough to really be considered wealthy, they have no mortgage payment, a social security check, a pension and most have a 401k.
The business cycle will not change their spending one bit.
Being an aging human is a suicide note. The extra steps are the entire point of retirement.
You did in fact not rtfm?
>Black Friday sales set records and it not even cyber Monday.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/29/business/black-friday-us-econ...
I don't know where you're seeing "record numbers". 2024 wasn't a great year and you can argue spending was flat from that after inflation. I think the more relevant factor is "who" is spending the money in such a k-shaped economy. .
Checking the stats online growth is up and on par with previous years creating that record breaking stat. Instore numbers arent out yet but some figures are claiming less foot traffic in stores compared with previous years. So i'd say to early to really call if spending was down(compared with expectations)
1. I saw the same headline - the article stated that there were record SEASON sales, not Black Friday sales. The headline did not match the content of the article. 2. Record revenue, not necessarily record units sold. To be expected with inflation. 3. Savvy online shoppers may be bundling purchases to reduce shipping costs. Waiting for a seasonal sale to buy holiday gifts as well as detergent, snacks and underwear may be quite prudent.
Finally, increased sales revenue does not necessarily equate to more jobs. It can, but by no means does it have to.
The holiday season on the whole is a much better indicator, not just one single day. And even then, spending needs to be checked against debt incurred.
(1) People wait for when they perceive they'll get the best deals to do their shopping. (2) K-shaped economy (data is already bearing this out btw): Spending from the wealthy is driving consumption figures vs. the bulk of the population (3) Anxiety about rising prices cause people to purchase now vs. later. See for example RAM prices.
.
Also, shocking to see no mention of the investment thesis, let alone critique of it.
What do you mean by the "investment thesis"? Would you clarify?
Think of the promise of AGI as a promise of billions of tireless immigrants with PhDs who outcompete the other ethnicities in the labor market. It's the same reason people stopped investing in Detroit-based things years ahead of the industry pullout.
That seems unlikely. What is the point of an economy if there is no one who is actually able to consume?
Of course, this all implies that the rest of us will just sit and starve quietly. Somehow I don't think that's likely.
I don't agree with the thesis, but that is what the thesis is.
It's a very screwed up incentive to be rewarded for breaking the system, but that's 2025 in a nutshell.
I used to think this was because the party that represents the ruling class didn't know what they were doing.
Now I think these economic collapses and ensuing fire sales are not accidents, they know exactly what they're doing.
Now, the bigger problem is that you're supposed to raise taxes during the boom so that you can run deficits during the recession to recover quickly. Unfortunately we run deficits during the boom so that the crash is even bigger as well ...
https://medium.com/newco/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6d...
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
Mostly kidding.
Source: Betteridge's law of headlines
