When the economy starts to slip — or to plunge, as the case is now — whisky sales plummet. Used furniture sales shoot through the roof.
And, at least here in Columbia, scrapyards make a killing.
Bill, our bushy-bearded neighbor, just alerted me today that scrap metal — his livelihood — has dropped to $80 per ton in the last several weeks. Just mid-summer, last time I went with him to the scrapyard, the rate was nearly twice that.
“It’s slipped another fifteen bucks a ton since Monday,” Bill muttered.
“God, why?” I asked, betraying my (lower-middle class) isolation from life below the poverty line. A life that’s an increasingly likely possibility.
Bill looked at me as if I’d just woken from a three week nap. “Wall Street,” Bill answered. “Drive down Ash Street. Drive down Sanford. See how many junk cars are left. See how much scrap metal. It’s gone. Gotta pay the bills.”
And because of this new glut of supply at the scrapyards, demand is quickly waning. For Bill, it’s harder than ever to keep his family afloat. His daily shouting fits in the yard are louder, start earlier, go later.
The scrap-yards, of course, are reveling in it. Nervously. For them, for now, it’s a buyer’s world. Desperation up, prices down.
But then, their buyers are playing the same game with them. And desperation trickles up. All the way up to Wall Street.
