Tips for the New Recession

I'm told the United States stock market has hit the skids and we're facing a recession as bad or worse than that of 2008, an ugly one around here, with shuttered businesses and gasoline at over $4 a gallon and city people dumping their pets here and country people poaching deer and echinacea roots, and meth labs in the woods.

Times were lean but I made it through. Just today I began listing what I'd do to survive this next one:

1. Purchases of any type are limited to one day per week: Sunday.
2. Avoid strip-mall businesses.
3. Prioritize health and friends. Travel, decor and trinkets when times improve.
4. Don't date people or acquire a pet.
5. Increase intake of beans and potatoes (which I like), but eat 3 meals daily with at least 3 ounces of protein at each.
6. Goodwill if needing something. Discount and ethnic grocery stores only.
7. Gorilla Glue, y'all.
8. Handkerchiefs and the rag bag.
9. Exercise, but not hard or long. Hard exercise increases the appetite -- savagely.
10. Use what you've got, like that passel of pink and orange lipsticks.
11. Library.
12. Work harder? No. Use leverage ( = making use of what you already have to move forward). 
13. Uber Driver if it comes to that; already called to adjust car insurance for that.

The Dismal Science

"Hi, Galaxy," I said to my phone. "Call The Medicine Shoppe." A Walgreens recording answered. Figuring that Galaxy messed up, I myself dialed the Old Towne pharmacy I'd used for 14 years. Chillingly, the Walgreens tape answered again.

It was surreal. I'd picked up a refill three days before from the familiar pharmacists and techs in the drab little Shoppe that kept only one of each item on its shelves, and had a rack of greeting cards that I alone (I think) bought from.

I drove there. Medicine Shoppe #1390 has closed. All prescriptions were transferred to the Walgreens a quarter-mile away, the sign said. No chance to ask questions or say goodbye before the staff--a motley, earnest, totally sterling team of women whom I trusted with my life--dispersed--to where?

Walgreens welcomes "Customers of Medicine Shoppe #1390"

I'd shunned the Walgreens because The Medicine Shoppe ladies saw my husband through his two and a half years of fatal illness; they'd rented me crutches; they'd witnessed my weepings and ailments, phoned and argued with doctors and insurers, knew all my secrets, and had never, not once in 14 years, given me the wrong medicine. I saw them save their meds from floodwaters. My insurer tried to force me to fill prescriptions by mail and I refused. My loyalty is non-negotiable.

Closed now. Maybe bankrupt. Or not profitable.Could have been franchisee's retirement, corporate downsizing, or higher rent. Maybe unable to compete with the Walgreens, grocery-store, and Walmart pharmacies within a two-mile radius. Possibly new rules for Medicare prescription payments. But no goodbyes. The weirdest sort of shock and heartache. And they're all out of work. They call economics "the dismal science" for a reason.

Walgreens had a sign outside to welcome me. Things could be much worse. But I wanted to cry.

Stripping It Bare

Sav-A-Lot became the Eureka Market this past year, but a few weeks ago it shocked me with a message in stark black Magic Marker on the door: "DUE TO THE ECONOMY THIS STORE IS CLOSING." It is now its final week, has emptied all but about 10 percent of its normal stock and is selling it all cheap. I have shopped there -- not as my primary store but as a reliable source of canned beans and tomatoes, and real corn tortillas -- since 1999, by my reckoning about 200 times. This store has anchored this particular strip mall since 1966.

Its parking lot had cars so I went in there today, surveyed the shelves, got a cart and loaded it to the top with the last of the: pitted kalamata olives, spicy mustard, balsamic vinegar (that item never sold very well), canned tomatoes, canned artichoke hearts at half the normal price, green Tobasco, Progresso chicken-sausage gumbo for when I don't make my own, black walnuts, tiny canned shrimp, tissues, birdseed, heavy-duty foil, boxes of Jello and so on, perhaps 100 pounds of groceries, to the tune of $83, about one-third to one-half of what I would have paid for it in a normal store. Remaining is a lot of bagged candy, cake mix and canned ravioli, and sunglasses 2 for $1; but no bread, meat, milk or produce. If the boxes were mouseproof I'd have bought more cereal. The bad economy has taken so much from so many, me included. I took advantage to stock up for harder times.

I should have known this was coming when I went in needing bleach, found none, and was told "it would be in tomorrow," and when the store cut its hours and its staff (soon to be jobless), but like any death it's always a shock, and it was truly like a funeral in there today.

Times of the Signs, Part 2: Ruma, IL

Took this through the glass of an abandoned shop that apparently sold hardware/car parts and things.

Times of the Signs, Part 1: Allenton, Mo.