The stock market was closed for two days on account of Hurricane Sandy. When the major exchanges opened on Wednesday Home Depot was top performing on the big board and insurance companies were drowning at the bottom.
Hint: Everybody was boarding up their houses as the storm approached, and now they’re doing repairs — buying supplies at Home Depot and the other big box stores. Insurance companies will be less profitable because they’re paying out damages from the storm, so investors dump their shares like hot potatoes.
In a few months the home repair frenzy will die down and investors will dump their Home Depot shares for a healthy profit. A lot of that profit will go overseas, a lot of it to savvy mutual funds and a tiny bit to long term investors who have Home Depot shares in a basket of holdings that span all industries.
None of that profit will go to the mom and pop hardware stores in New Jersey and elsewhere on the East Coast. Their share of the hardware business diminishes with every passing storm. Their ability to make a tidy profit in “good times” makes it that much harder to eke out a living for the other six hard years out of seven.
This is just what the Jews did to Germany in the 1800’s that made the locals so angry at them. They changed the marketing rules, made an enormous profit (hint: the Rothchilds et al), and drove traditional shops into the ground.
That is exactly what is happening now. Big box stores like Home Depot use their pricing clout to drive local hardware stores out of business. The profits that might otherwise bolster the local economy go elsewhere, often out of the U.S. altogether. One Walmart can put a dozen small shops in a community out of business overnight. Ditto for Home Depot and all the other big box stores.
Big Brother is taking control of main street right before our very eyes. It’s never as obvious as during a major storm like this.
Big box stores open back up right away with their expensive generators (shipped across the country from centralized warehouses), their small armies of workers (again, borrowed from other outlets) and their world class repair crews that have the stores all fixed up before anybody else even has a pencil sharpened to estimate the damage.
With their big lights on, sales flashing in the papers and on TV, these corporate leviathans suck you in and take your money, thank you very much.
They say that most small businesses don’t make a profit on the year until “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving. Hardware stores make their profit after storms. The big box stores take all that money away from them with ruthless efficiency and arrogant disdain.
They suck all the oxygen out of the air before the mom and pop stores can even catch their breath.
Small towns, suburbs and now big cities are being transformed by this metamorphasis. The culture and local color are fading to a dull, lifeless, monotonous gray.
The uniqueness and identify of each enclave are washed out like the waves of Sandy hitting the shoreline, leaving a bleak landscape of destruction as far as the eye can see.
