iPhone Recession Case

The Buffalo News – Roughing it on campus

The Buffalo News – UB camper decides to retreat from nature

The Spectrum – Homeless, not hopeless

The person I interviewed for this piece, we’ll call him Jim, is a college student at an American public university. He is an academic, comes from a family who lives in a small town, and previously lived in a sizable apartment. In this recession the college students have not been spared entirely – Jim has no job and could not afford to live in his apartment anymore. When his lease ran up he moved out – with an interesting plan.

Jim planned to live temporarily on a mattress in the stairwell of an academic building. As the weather got better, he planned to build himself a shack in the woods – just a very small place to stay. It has been a few weeks that he has been living now in the stairwell. He stands the mattress up against the wall during the day and no one seems to mess with it. He has tried to remain an unknown guest in the building – but some construction workers know of his presence, although they don’t seem to bother him.

I asked whether he ever thought this was an insane move. He recounted a story to me of a couple of days ago – Jim had fallen asleep in a couple of chairs in a lab room, and woke up around 4AM. It was at this time he questioned the sanity of it all – he expressed his train of thought to me: “This is madness, you just woke up at 4:00am in a lab, you are about to go sleep in a mattress you loaded into a 4th floor stairwell, you are building a cabin in the woods.” He said it reminded him of a MAD TV sketch.

None of this seems to change his mind about what he should be doing though.

Jim did have some entertaining stories to tell about his living in the stairwell though. One day he approached his mattress – set off to the side of the stairwell as usual – and he found written on the side in black permanent marker “Lowest Budget Student Housing” and a dollar twenty-five left on top of it. Perhaps stairwell living is profitable he thought.

We at The Recession Blog would like to wish Jim the best of luck, and will be checking in with him in the future to find out how his living arrangements are progressing!

“In today’s tough economic times, there are people facing the decision to either cancel their cable subscription or their Internet connection to make ends meet,” said Syabas COO, Alex Limberis. (Source)

This is rather disappointing if you ask me. This device in question is $299 – definitely outside of the budget of someone considering cancelling their cable or internet connections. In reality their claim is flawed anyway – cancelling your television subscription in many cases raises the price of your internet if you are subscribing to the Time Warner or Verizon models.

It seems everywhere we turn someone is trying to make a buck (or quite a few bucks as in this case) by saying something to the effect of “Given these economic conditions, you NEED our product more than ever!”

Perhaps we can summarize this problem by saying – in these economic times, sales tactics such as these are necessary.

The concept is simple – stay home and relax instead of traveling to experience someplace else. Perhaps this is something we should have been doing all along – a couple of weeks off to spend with our family in the comfort of our own home sounds a lot more appealing to me than the crowds at your tourist trap of choice. Sure, you might not be able to see the Grand Canyon this year, but that time spent enjoying your own back yard which you spend so much time maintaining, or reading that book you’ve been meaning to might not be such a bad thing after all.

To be honest with you though – I don’t believe this concept is at all a new one. Sure, the term was recently coined, but the concept was not. All my life I have known family and friends to take weeks or months off of work to work on their own projects and enjoy their lives. Perhaps this term is really just for those who are used to taking vacations who feel somehow wronged by their current inability to get away to someplace wondrous.

I suppose for the rest of us we can still say it’s not that bad as long as our recession lexicon only gains words such as “staycation” instead of words like “Hooverville.”