Black Friday

I guess someone forgot to tell all the millions of shoppers I encountered over the weekend that they were supposedly not shopping, hoarding all their cash, afraid of losing their job and their future financial security. Someone most have forgot to tell them that all the media and gov't were taking very short term trends and extrapulating them into the future, instead of wondering if this short-term adjustment to new economic realities is very basic human nature and caution. This is a buyer's market - in everything. And I personally think it's a real breath of fresh air to be able to choose the best vendor, the best employee, the best deal, the best price - instead of how it was over the past few years - where you took what was available, whether it was a good value proposition or not. For us, we were forced to hire yahoos far up on our in-house 'yahoo-scale', accept that they would steal time and material from us, accept that their work needed to be managed closely, accept that even though we provided a great working environment, paid our bills quickly and built neat homes - we had to accept all this would be lost on many of our vendors who usually couldn't see their ass from their elbow, let alone the forest from the trees. We had to accept the painful with the glorious in order to 'keep it moving'. But now it's payback - for those vendors who treated us respectfully, we are probably the busiest building company in the region. For those who didn't, good luck out there - it's a rough and tumble world, to be sure.