The Leading Indicators

by Gregg Easterbrook

  “Baby, it scares me when you get like this,” Margo said. Calling him “baby” took a little edge off. When the young and fancy-free Margo called a man “baby,” this meant she was in the mood to be on her back or her knees. Calling Tom “baby” had meant that for twenty years, just not lately.

  “You being winded, this has been happening. You know better than me. Surely you should—”

  “I don’t need to pay a doctor to look at my date of birth and tell me my age.”

  “Shortness of breath is a specific symptom, Tom.”

  He sat down and pushed the shoes off his feet. Margo could smell perspiration in Tom’s socks. She saw dried blood on one of his heels, where he must have developed a blister.

  “I should be in better shape, I’m running all day long,” Tom said.

  When he needed pants now he bought them over the Internet or went to a store alone, so Margo wouldn’t know his waist size. There were faint crinkles on his neck, skin no longer taut—the subtle declines of middle age, in their way worse than the obvious ones. Anyone in middle age knows the sweetness of youth has passed. But until the evidence appears in the mirror, this topic can be avoided. As Tom looked out of his own eyes, he saw the world exactly as he’d seen the world when he could stay up till three A.M., when he could run five miles, when his stomach was lumber-flat, when the sight of Margo in a towel made him erect in seconds.

  The mind behind Tom’s eyes thought in the same way it had in youth, and carried the same hopes. For his life until this point, Tom had been capable, lean, attractive to women, on his way up in the world. Since adolescence, this was the only condition he’d known. When Tom looked out through his eyes, he was watching the same movie he had watched all his life, of a fascinating world awaiting discovery. Looking outward, from his perspective nothing had changed. But now when Tom looked into the mirror, he saw the indicators of decline. The movie of the great world will always be playing. How much longer would he be in the audience?

  “I didn’t realize they made you run with the packages.”

  “Run from the truck to the door. Any package less than twenty pounds, you’re supposed to run. Coming back from the door without a package, always run. Every day you’re rated on seconds per delivery. The only way to finish the route on time is to run. That’s why we wear shorts even on cool days, prevent overheating from running. No friendly chatting with customers—stop to chat and your seconds-per-delivery drops.” Tom had noted the delivery drivers running back and forth to package cars outside their old large home. Then, he admired their hustle. Now he understood they had no choice.

  “When you talk to people at call centers, you can tell they’re not supposed to chat,” Margo said. “They must receive points for getting callers off the line. Then they end the call by asking, ‘Have I provided excellent service today?’”

  “Anybody who actually did provide excellent service would be fired,” Tom said.

  Margo knew she had more than once, when riding high in life, berated a clerk or laborer or other person in a low-paid, no-future job. “Call centers and eight-hundred numbers are maddening but we are just reaping what we sowed,” Margo said. “We were the ones who demanded that everything be cheap and fast.”

  “Last week I received a warning letter from the district manager,” Tom said.

  Margo made the smallest cringe, then hated herself for doing so. Tom hadn’t told her this, which obviously meant they had reached such straits that a letter from some petty tyrant district manager at a delivery contractor had upset Tom.

  “I was on a route, old lady answers the door when I ring to leave her box. Tells me someone has broken into her house. Of course it’s her imagination. But she lives alone. To comfort her I go in, walk around the house with her, show her no one is there. Open all the closets with her. District manager wants to know why the computer log of when I scanned the package bar code to when the truck moved again shows I was parked in front of the same house for eight minutes, eighteen seconds. Time is money, says he. Docked me an hour’s pay.”

  “Doing an old lady a favor for eight minutes, and they docked you an hour?”

  “Time is money, says he.”

  “All this rushing, isn’t there a government regulation or something?”

  “You just said it. Our generation—we demanded lower prices, everything fast and at discount. Wasn’t government’s idea, was our idea. For twenty dollars, FedEx takes a package cross-country in two days, brings it to your door, rings the bell. For thirty-five dollars, cross-country overnight. And still the customers complain it’s not cheap enough.”

  Low-priced products are made possible by replacing workers with machines, after doing a cost-benefit analysis. If a worker earns $50,000 a year in pay and benefits, and she can be replaced with a capital investment that costs $250,000 after the tax breaks, then the machine will pay itself back in five years. Plus machines might need repair but never get sick; ones that fail are junked. People get sick and require long-term care, then pensions.

  If a machine’s payback period is five years, that’s a precarious call for management, since in five years the machine may be obsolete, in which case you were better off staying with the worker. But if the prices of capital equipment for automation fall, and say the payback comes in two years, definitely replace the person with the machine. Prices for automation equipment were falling—partly because machines were beginning to build machines.

  As for services, making prices keep falling in inflation-adjusted terms is possible only by running from the curb, by canceling employee benefits, by paying people for eight hours when they work ten, by laying personnel off at the slightest downturn then imposing mandatory overtime when business is good.

  Delivering packages all day—most of them ordered from warehouse-based companies that offered good prices by cutting labor and health-care costs—Tom knew this too well. “Our generation, we were the ones who realized we could go to a store and get an hour of a salesman’s time explaining product options, then go home, put the product ID number into Google and order over the Internet for less,” he said. “We thought we were sticking it to the man. We were sticking it to the man’s employees.”

  “At least delivery is physical. Can’t be outsourced to Cambodia,” Margo said.

  Tom shook his head. Some trends such as declining factory employment were inevitable. After all, if improved technology had been outlawed in the 1950s, we’d be driving 8 mpg cars with no seat belts. But did that mean every economic trend should be accepted as inevitable?

  “The cardiologists and bankers, the real-estate brokers and management consultants—they love outsourcing because it’s good for corporate dividends and it drives down prices where they shop,” Tom said. “Outsourcing hasn’t come for them yet. Wait till high-paying white-collar jobs start being done remotely via broadband from the opposite hemisphere. Then the people with the cushy insider positions will scream bloody murder.”

  Margo said, “When we were set in life, we believed in a better world. But what did we do to create one?” She let the thought hang. Practically everyone of Margo and Tom’s generation said they believed in a better world. What specific thing did any of them do to bring one about?

  Tom knew that even he, as a goodhearted man, had spent more of his life indulging minor complaints than working toward the better tomorrow he would have told a pollster he favored. Tom once sat in his expansive corner office and stewed if someone important hadn’t paid attention when he was speaking at a meeting. Felt ill-used if he didn’t win an award that should have been his due. If the family vacation cabin wasn’t close enough to the lakefront. If all the parking spaces were gone when he arrived. If the forks weren’t chilled.

  “Now that my eyes are open, I feel ashamed of how spoiled I was,” Tom said. He’d been sitting for a while yet his breathing still was a bit irregular.

  “There is nothing wrong with being spoiled. The only thing wrong is that everybody isn’t spoiled.”


  Tom looked up as though he had something terrible to relate: “Today I delivered a package to Gresham Cooper. Remember him?”

  “Of course! We had brunch with him and Melanie at the Ritz-Carlton.” Margo tried to laugh at her own words, adding, “That was, ah, some while back.”

  “I get a package addressed to him. Marked Fragile—a set of Williams-Sonoma sommelier glasses. His new place is in the Cresthaven Woods development. Very nice, $1.6 mil for the entry models, comes with membership in their pool and tennis club. I was praying nobody would be home, but he answered the bell.”

  “That must have been awkward.”

  “When he recognized me, he thought it was some prank. You know, I dressed up as a delivery guy in order to play a joke.”

  “Did you play along?”

  “I blurted it out—repeatedly laid off, desperate for money. He didn’t know what to say. I could see he was trying to figure out whether he should tip me.”

  “Did he?” Margo’s question was not entirely idle.

  “Sure didn’t invite me in to talk. Standing at the door I was looking past him into his house. Blond wood, Noguchi tables, wine racks, grand piano. Tasteless modern art—the surest sign you’ve made it in life. Serene and prosperous. I wanted to go in so badly.”

  “Luck will change for us, Tom.”

  “That kind of house stands for how our generation lost its way. Yet I want so badly to be in it. I want so badly to open the door and see you and the girls inside.”

  “There is nothing wrong with wanting to live in a beautiful house,” Margo said.

  “You should be in a house like that. You will be. It’s what I owe you. But I will never enter that house again.”

  “Tom, our luck will change.” She meant to placate him and hadn’t understood what he said.

  “You will live in a beautiful house again. The girls will come home from school and open the door to a place of plenty. It’s all laid out.”

  Replaying in her head the tape of the conversation, Margo heard again what he said a moment before, and felt the vise of panic.

  “Tom, what are you saying?”

  “It’s all laid out. You and the girls will live in a house in a place with a name like Cresthaven. You will never look at prices in restaurants. You will order from Williams-Sonoma. But I will not experience these things again.”

  “Tom, you’re scaring me! Are you going to break the law?”

  “Not me, never. I am one of those suckers who plays by the rules.”

  The business leaders and politicians who will tell any lie for money or power, do they repent on their deathbeds? On their deathbeds they think, “I did what I wanted, I got what I wanted, I fucked who I wanted and I never paid any price. I was smart, not like those fools who play by the rules.”

  Whether a person can sin through life, then repent on his deathbed and win admission to glory, has been debated at least since Constantine, who followed exactly this formula. Tom suspected most who attain power or wealth don’t bother to repent. Rather, they revel in the knowledge that they did whatever they wanted while people like Tom, held back by ethics, carried the weight of society.

  Tom’s voice was hollow and his tone approached self-pitying as he called himself a sucker—so unlike the gleaming young man she’d bumped into that day in Chicago. Margo did not know how to get him to talk about what was on his mind, or to explain the plan he had vaguely referred to over the past two years.

  “I did it today,” Tom said, plainly.

  “‘It’?”

  “Applied at McDonald’s. I can work a full shift Saturday and a half shift Sunday. That’s all I can stand. I must have a few hours a week when I’m not working. Assistant manager, $14.85 an hour. Minus uniform deduction.”

  “Tom, no! Things are not so bad that we need a third job in the family.”

  “The car insurance will be canceled if I don’t bring in another hundred a week. We’re paying on extended plan as it is and I’m still short. And I’ve got to cover that cash-advance loan somehow. The way they add interest, each week we owe more.”

  Once they’d had gold-plated credit, borrowing at just above prime. Now they were borrowing at 23 percent. Those whose situations are secure receive the best deals; those who are struggling get the short end, which holds them back from escaping from struggle.

  McDonald’s! In one of its locations Margo years ago complained, in a too-loud voice, as though she were visiting royalty, because one of the girls’ Happy Meals contained a boy’s toy rather than the requested girl’s toy. Margo made a cross face at a minimum-wage worker who barely spoke English. The memory of this incident, which lasted perhaps all of ninety seconds, lent Margo discomfort. She might have caused the woman to be taken aside and yelled at by a superior. Even if not, she’d given a low-paid person in an inferior position a hard time about something inexpressibly minor.

  Generally people are courteous to their social and financial equals. How you treat those who earn far less than you—it was not the fashion to say “beneath you,” but class relationships continue regardless of fashion—is one of the tests of character. The politician or corporate boss or school principal or football coach who screams at interns or secretaries or sophomores is a person of low character. The incident had been years ago, but Margo felt no small discomfort at the memory of castigating a fast-food worker.

  McDonald’s! Was it everything wrong with America, or everything right? The company’s cheeseburgers are good, and the world was voting with its feet on this point. People benefit from inexpensive cheeseburgers, especially average people who can’t afford sit-down dining. Nobody puts a gun to anyone’s head and makes the person buy a Big Mac rather than spend the same amount on lentils and fresh vegetables. And wasn’t McDonald’s adding fruit and yogurt options?

  Margo felt that to work in a McDonald’s or any similar place as a teenager, or as a recently arrived immigrant learning to fit in, even as a retiree wanting a little extra cash for part-time hours, was impossible to argue with. But for adult breadwinners to be able to find no better employment than a fast-food counter was an indictment of society. She shivered to think of Tom standing by the register on Saturday night, urging customers to add fries to their orders.

  “We’ll move somewhere small and live simply,” Margo said. “The country is caught up in gotta-have-it, gotta-get-it. Let’s move to a small town. Leave the rat race, the traffic jams, the status preening. Watch Fourth of July fireworks from the high-school bleachers. We could be twice as happy with half as much.”

  They’d just moved as it was, so Tom knew they could not afford to move again now—maybe in a year. Tom liked the idea of the simple life in a small town, but had looked at the numbers. Assuming they rented a truck and did all the lifting themselves, moving would cost at least $2,000, plus more deposit money upfront to rent in the new location, plus a total gamble on finding jobs.

  Why do a billion members of the world’s underclass remain in slums and shantytowns? Because they can’t afford to move. The same could apply, though in a much different way, to Americans caught in economic currents. When Detroit automakers began their first big retrenchment, in the late 1970s, a few who lost jobs pulled up stakes and moved to growth areas such as Texas or Arizona. There they were known as “black taggers,” for the simple white-on-black Michigan license plate of the period. Most who got out may have been glad they did. But many couldn’t afford to move.

  And another move would cause the girls to think they had become vagrants. Tom and Margo had engaged in elaborate pretenses to shelter the girls from the family’s economic reality. Obviously their daughters sensed something amiss; perhaps they knew everything—children always know more about what’s going on than their parents think. But Caroline and Megan did not press for details—what’s happening with the family and money is such a scary topic. If they moved yet again, there could be no more pretending.

  “I was in Bank of America yesterday—”

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p; “Where before we were VIP Platinum,” Margo interjected. She was amused by the contemporary usage of the word “platinum” to mean “exceptionally special,” considering ninety-nine of a hundred people had never encountered the metal and wouldn’t know it if some were placed in their laps.

  “They couldn’t have cared less what we used to be. I tried to talk to the bank about restructuring what we owe, to move the payday-loan debt into regular financing. They said we’re now a bad risk. They were sharp. Laser focus on their own bottom line, plus taxpayer subsidies. Nice work if you can get it.”

  His expression became drained, though not for lack of thought. “I was pulling big bucks, I’d met the governor and knew members of Congress, I could have spoken out against the inequity of life and didn’t,” he said. “I feel in some way I deserve this fate. Promise me you will be sure the girls do not repeat my mistake.”

  Margo assumed that by “fate” he meant their financial circumstances.

  She could not stand to hear him forlorn. “Tom, don’t speak of yourself like that,” she said, touching his hand. “You are a good man. If only every man was like you! You are what God hoped for when He made the world.”

  Tom looked at her as if grateful for the courtesy of a compliment he did not deserve; Margo was not the sort of person to invoke the divine. Then something caused him to decide to tell her.

  “I kept up the payments on the executive life insurance policy,” he said, as if to reveal that he had kept up payment were to reveal a shameful secret. “It’s one of the reasons we are always desperate for cash. The premium is a thousand dollars a month. I’ve paid it.”

  “Tom, why? We need that money for other things!”

  On any subject other than Tom, Margo’s mind already would have snapped to the realization of why.

  “Whenever I’m exhausted, whenever I despair, I console myself with the thought that no matter how many ways I have failed, I have kept up the premiums on that policy. You and the girls will have five million.”