bicycles

My guage of the economy has typically been the customer service I receive at Walmart. If I get really poor service then I figure the economy is doing really well because Walmart can only get "poor" (as in job performance) workers to hire. If I get good service then I figure that the economy must be doing poorly because Walmart can actually get good employees. Well, today I found a different guage for the economy--bicycles. Yep, you read that right--bicycles. The gas prices have finally begun to make a significant impact on our personal household economy. So in order to ease that a little we decided to get Joe a bicycle. If he saves one tank of gas by riding his bike to work this summer then the bike will pay for itself. We are in a small town and it is about 3 miles to work one way so we determined that this was a good solution. Yesterday evening we went on our quest to buy Joe a bike. We reached Walmart with excitement only to discover that they only had about 25% of the total number of bicycles that they normally sell. And most of the ones they had left were in $200 range. It seems that everyone had the smart idea to buy a bicycle. I also had very, very poor customer service as I was trying to purchase mulch. And so I've changed my mind--bicycles are a better sign of the status of the economy.