The Economy can Eat my Shorts

I have to tell you something about my town. This town thrives on four things:

1) Coffee Shops
2) Hockey (we have three full sized hockey rinks on the same street and one flooded park every winter)
3) The Mills (pulp, and mill)
3.5) (I don’t like the way the decimal floats up in the blog entry page…. actually it’s the numbers that are drooped lower…. oh yeah, the list) The Mines. And this is a .5 because there are no mines in or near my town, they’re all like an hour and a half away.
4) Specialty Restaurants/Shops.

Of course there are other jobs in town, stores, fast food restaurants, construction, that kind of crap… but by and large this is the stuff here.

Now the only thing that hasn’t really been super effected by the recent recession is Hockey. This town fucking loves hockey and we’ve had a guy in the Stanley Cup play offs every year for the past 5. In fact, since the recession attendance at the local hockey rink has almost doubled. Coffee Shops are still doing pretty well because this town fucking loves coffee. I don’t get it honestly, but then again I fricken hate coffee. We have two locally owned coffee companies (one of them has two locations), one locally owned coffee company that’s opened seasonally, a Tim Hortons (a second one is on it’s way) and a Starbucks. In talking to owners/employees of these places they say that business hasn’t really been effected by the downturn.

The mills have been effected a fair amount. We have a saw mill that’s always been in a bit of trouble but they’ve been closed down about a month longer than they were supposed to and recently the pulp mill laid off some guys for six weeks (this effects my father actually).

But the thing that bugs me are the specialty restaurants/shops. I work for a pizza place in town, but I won’t tell you which one… unless I already have…. because… well I might have. It’s part of a pizza chain. Anyways, there’s a specialty pizza place in town called Mojo’s Pizza. Mojo’s Pizza, in the words of GMcC “Rocks Shit”. This is the best pizza place I have ever ate at hands down. It blows the pizza place I work for out of the water easily.

And recently they closed down.

The quality of food and the level of service was absolutely second to none. Their pizza was never greasy and done in the pan crust deep dish style. Loaded with toppings and a crust that is to die for it was known to make people orgasm in their pants (or maybe that was just me). The only downside was cost, and really, it wasn’t THAT expensive. $3.50 a slice or $7.50 for two slices and a drink. A whole pizza cost twenty dollars and it was big, 21″ or something like that, it was amazing, and they had to close. The economy had hit them pretty hard and the place was becoming this dead end street for them. They  had never lost money on the place, always paid bills, and had amazing food. You’d think the bank would give them a loan to get a bigger place? No. Even when the economy was good they refused. This restaurant, started by two kids I went to school with was fucking amazing and it was drowned by a bunch of fucking suits.

And the thing that REALLY gets my goat about all of this? The whole fucking thing has gotten this bad because of paranoia. Businesses were told that tough times were coming so they laid of staff and cut back hours. Then, low and behold, the tough times came. Why? Because no one could afford to spend any money! They weren’t making any so they couldn’t spend it on anything! How stupid are you people!? Of course people aren’t buying anything, they don’t have any money to spend because you laid them off/fired them! BLARGH!

I am so mad that this shop, this place I ate lunch at every friday or saturday afternoon when I picked up my comic books so I could do two of my favourite things at once (eat pizza, and and read comic books), and now they’re gone. I spent $45 and I was the last customer they ever sold pizza to. The pizzas are currently in my freezer, packaged so I may select from any four of my favorite flavours and enjoy my comic books while I consume their food. This will be happiness to me for eight Saturday afternoons.

They’ve both got jobs lined up. One is going to apprentice under a professional chef at a golf course, and the other is going to be a supervisor at a local food chain (thank God it’s not fast food). I will visit them both as the opportunities come up, and I will remind them both how much I loved their food.

It’s sad that extreme paranoia has brought us to this. And I can only pray that something turns it around before another thing that I love disappears.