It's Still Summer But It's Not So Hot.......

If you have been following my recent blog entries, perhaps you noticed the continuing theme of seasonality and how it plays out for those of us in the Household Goods Segment of the Transportation Industry. Or Moving, to put it bluntly. Of Course, at Box Brothers, our service capabilities include activities broader than general household moving, (fine art handling, antique packaging and shipping, museum quality crating, customized packaging, custom and stock boxes, customized food shipping boxes), as nothing we do at Box Brothers is normal, as we work for our customers and everything we do for them is our immediate priority.

But back to the theme of this blog, "...still summer, but its not so hot..", it seems that our nation and our world, had one hell of financial ride, courtesy of our financial markets: stocks dropped
500 points and then went up 450 points, or it went down 600 and went up 500, and the same thing happened all over European markets and in the Asian markets, too. Gold went to new record highs, and oil even came down a bit (actually the oil guys were away on vacation and got
caught not driving the price of fuel up, artificially, but they are back now--oil went up the last two days..no rest for the wicked I guess....).

For those of us in this business, we had hoped for a traditional summer full of business activity above the norm, till September). However, as reported earlier, business has just largely stopped. Even traffic seemed less on the roads. Like they took the wind out of the sails....the boats were listless. A sense of dread came over the small business community, as the reality
of the rigors of this economy and the preceding recession, seemed to have returned.

I was talking to a friend just today, and he told me about the most unusual experience he had yesterday. He went to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner yesterday, and not only was there no
wait, at peak dinner time, but the whole restaurant was empty. I asked if he was not having a dream......then I hear another story, one for the ages, ask me, that someone told me that they went to this nation's largest bank, Bank America, and for the whole banking day yesterday, all of their banking servers were down....and you could make a deposit yesterday, but you could not withdraw a dime, even if you had 10 million dollars in an active account at Bank America,
8/11/11.

Now lets think about this for a minute. The world's largest bank is saying its computers are down on the same day its stock hits an all time low......and you cannot withdraw your own money.....well, thank goodness that everything was fine today at the Bank, and today, the stock
market did not go down 500 points, but went up 125, so that is a good thing.

I am hopeful, that the economy can regain its footing and that these tremors can give way to better times. For those of us who have been trying to survive and persevere, it is not such a good feeling to see a slowdown, but I am going to be an optimist and believe that the best of times are a head, and for us, at Box Brothers, we will be ready, as that is how we roll, even if it is downhill......Have a great weekend.