Big and Little: The economy from the ground up

Last chance liquidation

Originally uploaded by lisa.williams.

H2otown saw them everywhere driving across the country this summer: people standing outside in the hot sun, holding last-chance liquidation signs.

She hadn't seen many of them around here until a few weeks ago, when she saw these. The guy holding the sign got hired as day labor, for minimum wage; during a visit to the store yesterday, H2otown asked an employee if they had another job yet. No, they replied. And they didn't expect to find one before Christmas, either.

Does H2otown seem a bit grinchy if she observes that no one seems to know about the day-laborer or the retail clerk, or even know who they are? MIA from the pages of the papers, or the pixels at CNN, who operate at a much grander scale.

So, let's scale up then. The Arsenal Mall is one of the town's top 10 taxpayers. Could the loss of an anchor tenant cause the collapse of the property itself, as it did here? The good news is, probably not, at least not for now. Simon Property Group, which owns the mall, looks very good against one of its main competitors, General Growth Properties, which teeters on the brink of collapse. Over the past year, Simon's stock price has been cut in half, and the historic Boston Garden scoreboard that hangs on the mall's second floor has a few tacky videoscreens bolted to the bottom but is otherwise dark. But a stock price of around $60 today is a lot better than how Linens and Things is doing -- the company is bankrupt and the stock has been delisted.