Shrinking take home pay and new trends

What gas prices are doing to take home pay makes a person want to cry! A member of The Telework Consortium summed up the whole situation this way- At $4 a gallon gas, it would take an employee earning $65,000 per year who commutes 40 miles round trip per day 2 /12 months to pay for commuting. That is twelve weeks and six days of his/her take home pay just to pay for the cost of daily commuting!

Although I’m not aware of the sociological and economic changes which have occurred to countries who have gone through the rocketing gas price experience we’ve gone through, I think we’ll see many changes in our society. I would guess some of these changes will include:

- More use of technology such as audio and video conferencing to replace commuting to work and taking business trips. As technology costs continue to drop and gas prices continue to rise, this trend is assured to happen.

- Shorter vacations, less vacations and people vacationing at home. ABC news recently used the term “staycations.”

-Increased use of mass transit

- A possible change in the infrastructure/funding of our highway system, the best system in the world! Can we continue to use tolls to support as much for road maintenance.

- Growth of more local retailing possibly. We all know the trend that occurred when the major national chains put the local, small retailer out of business. Will the tide change now and favor more local retailers now that gas costs so much?

- Increased use of the Internet for shopping. Ecommerce on the net is already growing substantially. I believe we’ll see this growth begin to move at warp speed as folks drive less.

-Families spending more time together, a good development if it happens. Author Faith Popcorn many years ago forecasted a trend called cocooning- people withdrawing more and spending time at home. I think we’ll see this.

-Growth in sales of home entertainment centers and other products and services built around the home to replace services which would normally be out of the home.

The examples I’ve given are the more obvious ones. I think there will be alot of less obvious, more subtle changes in how we will that may surprise all of us. What do you think? What changes do you think we’ll see?

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