Make It So

A former Famous Dave's south of Seattle.

While ostensibly due to local issues, like the cost of real estate, the closing of this restaurant seems indicative of what people are starting to expect from the national economy, especially here in Seattle, where the recent rash of layoffs among technology and gaming companies is both putting a significant number of people out of work, and acting as a headwind to those who found themselves unemployed previously.

As the number of available jobs is seen to shrink, the competition for them grows more fierce, and a number of people have simply decided that it's futile to keep looking, and so have retired early, or otherwise exited the workforce.

While out-and-out business closures, like this restaurant in the picture, are somewhat rare, the perception is that more are coming. And if one of the leading indicators of a recession is people's belief that a recession is in the offing, the risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy is growing, as the paradox of thrift threatens more and more people's employment, and they respond to the uncertainty by dialing back their spending.

The growth of generative automation in the technology sector isn't helping matters, but I suspect that this is more because people see corporations as hostile to labor, and looking for reasons to downsize, than the actual threat currently posed by the LLMs themselves.