Within foodservice, talk of recession is danced around and downplayed by all except the occasional skunk that drops by the garden party. No one, after all, wants to be known as the Grinch who snatched away signs of hope from this big bonanza. Evidence is getting harder and harder to ignore, though, as classic signs of a recession chill the economy.
Factory orders are down and the brakes have slammed on new-car sales.
Ripples from the tech crash of 2000 continue to seep into the broader marketplace. Unemployment, which seemed to have forgotten how to go up, is slowly, tentatively, regaining that lost memory. Many in the news media ran it up the flagpole as fact. Interest rates have taken a northward trek, but whispers out of Alan Greenspan's Washington suggest that perhaps a mild case of recession would allow them to come down just a little, paving the way for a soft landing and quick recovery. Such reports cause many to take pause and contemplate what all this means to an industry whose success is largely predicated on economic prosperity.