America's Financial Meltdown: How has it affected your life?

Originally Posted by Shin

Rather than pump money into the industry and hope it'll miraculously survive churning out the same old SUVs, your car companies need to start thinking about designing new cars that appeal to the current market (Cheaper, more efficient) or that can be sold abroad. Sadly, the rest of the world, in particular the Japanese are years ahead of you.

GM and Ford have closed many of their manufacturing facilities that specialized in assembling their SUVs and other family cars, and their business strategy now is mostly to build smaller, more economic gas-friendly (which is sadly about 30 mpg by American standards) cars. Of course, this is a knee-jerk reaction to oil prices and our toilet economy more than anything, and definitely not the result of a long-term business strategy. You're right to think it's too little too late, and I hate the idea of Obama wanting to bail out US auto companies once he takes office. None of the international auto companies with operations here are asking for squat. They don't need to, because they know how to build a good car.

So, how has this economy affected me? Well, a few ways. The biggest (and most annoying) thing is the amount of work I do at my job now. I work in a warehouse, and I used to work all day at a good pace because we always had a huge backlog of orders we had to pick and pack. We also got to work Saturdays whenever we wanted for overtime. The past two months, we haven't had a single Saturday to work, and I'm lucky if I'm able to actually do my job four hours out of the day. The rest of the time, we just drive around in our forklifts with our thumbs up our asses, or we ask the foremen for odd jobs (which basically equates to standing around with a bucket of sand). The economy also makes it hard to switch shifts. I work graveyard, and I want to switch to afternoons because of school. I guess I should be thankful that they have no plans to lay off anyone, but they are offering voluntary leave now, and I'm sure that's never a good sign.

The economy is affecting me in some other ways too, but because I'm young and don't own a house it's not affecting me as much as others. Actually, at my age, driving and buying groceries are my biggest concerns, and with oil prices plummeting, it's cheaper to drive, and hopefully that will translate to cheaper groceries sometime in the future too. I guess you can say my 401k is suffering, but this whole mess with our banks started about the same time I opened it, so it's not so bad. Actually, I'm still confident enough that I'm throwing a fifth of my salary in there.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Damn, if my job could go back to how I described it a few posts back, I'd be happy. Luckily, I WAS able to switch from graveyard shift to afternoons, but things have progressively gotten worse. Almost all of our benefits have been cut. No more paid vacations, no more paid holidays, company won't pay for university classes (though I couldn't enjoy that benefit anyway as a part-timer), and the company isn't matching a dime for our pension plans until further notice. Also, they cut four hours off of all part-timers' schedules, so I'm bringing home less money per week. If things get worse, I have no doubt they'll absolutely start laying off the part-timers.

There's nowhere I can't reach.