Thoughts About Stuff

(Just FYI, the above heading is a new designation in this Maia G blog--the entry that doesn't have anything directly to do with Maia's development. If you're not interested in that sort of content, go ahead and just jump over any "Thoughts About Stuff" posts.)

This doesn't really have anything to do with parenting, but there was an interesting article in the New York Times this weekend about the decline in the middle-class phenomenon known as "trading up." I like articles like this that explain how an economic downturn is affecting us in observable ways.

This article hits home to us here in the Genisio household; we did, occasionally, take a trip over to Williams Sonoma for kitchen goodies in the old days (circa 2004 or 2005) when we were living large and childless on two incomes. :) I don't miss that, however. Well, I do miss the tasty samples that they always used to have at the Somerset mall store on the weekends!

This article also gestures toward something that I've seen very distinctly in only a couple of places: New York City, and (to a MUCH lesser degree) Birmingham, MI. The article refers to the retailers it's discussing--Nordstrom, Coach, Williams Sonoma, Tiffany--as "mid-range" luxury goods. In Joanna's neighborhood in New York, the Upper East Side, the level of wealth is so incomprehensible to the vast majority of Americans that this true luxury is something beyond our scope. It's not even something we see. I'm sure, when one attains that level of luxury, Williams Sonoma is just another Sears, and Coach is the same as JCPenney.

Anyway, like I said, this has nothing to do with parenting (at least directly). Brian and I might be making more detours like this in this blog here and there as the development of our baby into a BIG KID spurs us to think about parenting in a larger context (such as, perhaps, raising a kid on one income in a shaky economy).