Your house? It’s worth nothing. Not that anyone could afford to buy it, anyway. Gas is about $600 a gallon. And health insurers have just put a $50,000 per prescription co-pay on every pill, because pills are a medically unnecessary frill.
Eggs are now more expensive than beer (which, just between you and me, is what God intended), and airplane tickets now have a $3,000 surcharge tacked on, because you’ve been eating too many complimentary pretzels.
And your job? Well, don’t bother bringing in any new potted plants for the desk. Unless you’re a really, really outstanding columnist for the Hartford Business Journal or something, your job is hanging by a thread — and the thread is probably made in Asia.
Lucky for all of us, summer vacation season will soon be beckoning, so we can put our troubles aside and escape.
Oops. I forgot. Nobody has any money.
Staying Home
Sluggish economic times are a special challenge for the travel and tourism folks, who depend on us for discretionary spending on hotel rooms and cruises and casinos and museums and lots and lots of alcohol.
You’ve probably already seen the fear and desperation at work. Cruise ships are offering discounts as deep as the oceans they float on. New York City hotels are practically giving away rooms on weekends, with that young girl that Eliot Spitzer likes thrown in for no extra charge.
In a region such as Metro Hartford, the travel professionals offer up several possible scenarios — besides the one about mass suicides at the Front Street project, where the new ad campaign is, “Come to the Front Street Mall: Lots and Lots of Space to Shop.”
One forecast predicts that we all stay home and sulk: No Berkshires, no Cape Cod, no Bermuda, no nothin’ — in which case, local travel and tourism sites will benefit from an unusual upsurge in local visitations — including rich people from Fairfield County who are investigating a rumor that they live in some state called “Connecticut,” whatever that is.
Another possibility is that recession-bedraggled consumers still want to travel — but not very far. If Connecticut steals all the money from the teacher retirement pension fund and most of the money from the Slush Fund For Local Legislators to Waste on Petunia Festivals and Stuff to spend it on travel advertising in the Northeast, some travel professionals say that craggy-faced couples from New Hampshire and other regional visitors will come to frolic in the Nutmeg State.
The Nutmeg Farm
Speaking of that, can’t we do a little better with a slogan or motto or something? This is recession. This is war. We’re competing against the likes of Minnesota — “Land of 10,000 Lakes and 400,000 Norwegians.”
Amazingly, the Nutmeg nickname for Connecticut didn’t even actually come from the nutmeg, which is a vegetable affiliated with the broccoli family.
A state legislator named “Meg” fought very hard in the 1800s for Connecticut to be a low-tax, minimum-regulation kind of state, where the General Assembly only met for two weeks a year. Freedom and liberty were important. They called her “Nutty Meg” — and the name stuck, even as the ideas died like an overripe nutmeg.
To be sure, Connecticut has experimented over the years with such stuff as, “Better Yet, Connecticut,” a slogan that actually prompted tourists to run from the state, screaming.
We have to do better. Atlantic City, for instance, is “always turned on,” which sort of makes me blush. New Orleans wants us to “Come Out and Play.”
Connecticut? Come in the fall, when the nutmegs are in bloom.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
