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Notes -
Scott: Highlights from the comments on British economic decline.
I’m interested particularly as a follow up to my discussion with @FirmWeird. Here we have an economy that struggles, where the citizens recognize it struggles, but the standard indicators look normal. I wanted to see if this would show up in the energy metrics we were discussing, but this data stops too early to say.
I really expect to see its energy per capita tank. Wealth getting swallowed up in housing has to push down energy consumption, at least compared to capital investment. I don’t think the UK has had anything like the shale boom distorting its cost per BTU, either.
So all the graphs and quantitative data show there's no UK economic decline... and the response is that people write articles wondering how the economic decline has managed to hide itself from statistics?
Hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. Maybe there's just no economic decline? Hell, if we're trying to be rationalists, the decline's absence from the statistics means that DEFINITIONALLY there is no decline.
As many of the commenters on Scott's site speculate: one gets the feeling that "UK Economic Decline" is something that europhilic economists want to be able to talk about (and blame on Brexit), therefore they assume it exists as an article of faith and spend their time conjuring up epicyclic reasons for how those dastardly Tories managed to hide it from every single graph in the world by gaming the metrics.
I don’t think no data is true. From the article I posted here.
https://twitter.com/Birdyword/status/1639536708059533313
I think it’s starting to be real.
https://www.sambowman.co/p/britain-is-a-developing-country
$125k is still an insane salary for someone working at a car wash in the US. Median personal income is just over $40k. Median household income is like $75k. In this case the Reddit thread about it when it was posted suggested this was a big place and the ‘manager’ was actually a relatively senior employee with a large staff.
Bucees are massive gas stations, they can be remote so it might be hard to find staff and they've been opening up a ton of new locations so they need to hire quickly. That said even the cashier is making $17/hr which is incredible to me, I made $6/hr as a cashier in 2005. A married couple working as cashiers at a gas station would have a household income of $68k which is not bad at all with rural Alabama COL.
I saw something on Twitter recently showing that the highest wage growth in recent years has been to people making under twenty dollars an hour. That matches my anecdotal evidence well enough. I saw a McDonalds offering $17.50 an hour a few days ago. Ten years ago that would have been a literal minimum wage job.
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You have to understand the Bucee’s business model to make sense of that sign. Every point on a major interstate highway has thousands of people who pass by every day. Those people all need to stop for food, gas, and restrooms somewhere. The marginal return on reputation in a market like that is huge. The Bucee’s model is to earn and maintain a reputation for elite service, especially when expanding into new areas like Alabama, where people have heard the hype, but may not have personally experienced it before. You will never see an “out of order” sign at Bucee’s. You will never see shit stains on your toilet at Bucee’s. You will always have toilet paper in your stall at Bucee’s.
These signs themselves are part of the aura. They are displayed prominently at the entrance to the store. Everyone entering the store knows that the workers are professionals and that this is a quality establishment. They have to be to deal with this.
That's a very good point. I think their strategy is working because they do have a good reputation and get a lot of buzz which is weird for a gas station. I know people who have driven over an hour just to go to a newly opened Bucees.
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