Tuesday, May 26, 2015

It's a bi-polar world.



This weekend was one of those weekends that just messes with your brain. On one hand it was the monthly Santa Row car show. It always sort of amazes me how posh Santana Row has gotten. It's like a mini Palo Alto in mall form. Everything just feels good there because money feels good.

On the other hand, the largest lumber yard in San Jose announced it was closing. This place has gotten me through more than one bad day during the recession. It wasn't just any lumber yard, it was the best lumber yard in the whole valley. They sold exotic hardwoods. They did milling. This was your high end carpentry sort of place. They had wood that was really hard to get. I found myself buying up all the carpentry grade cedar. I was surprised no one had picked it over yet. You can find the veneer easy, but not the other stuff as I found out a few months ago coincidentally. I was doing a closet floor.

This was one of those century old businesses. They made it through the Great Depression, but they aren't making it through the Great Recession. The reason they gave was in a Silicon Valley Business Journal article published Thursday, Pohle said, "Market conditions right now are crazy, and I'm at a point in my life where I just don't want to do this anymore."

It just bums be out because they probably provided a lot of the lumber that built this whole area. They logged the Santa Cruz mountains back in the day.

This is the real economy. And no matter how hard you try to distract yourself with that other stuff at Santana Row - it just sucks to see a company like this lose the good fight.

And well, also, the next best place is in Berkeley which kinda super sucks. That will take a chunk out of your day.

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