A ripple effect is the reason why no person in the time of recession can rest assured that his or her job is safe. In the same way small waves created after something is dropped into the water generate new ones, what happens to one person will trigger a ripple effect on all the others since we are all part of the same economic ocean. What happens in the time of recession is a loss of jobs which then sparks a ripple or chain reaction that hits a lot of other businesses. A person who has lost a job will cancel various services which they can now do on their own or do not have the need for them at all. Instead of going to a gym, they work out at home and instead of hiring a person to maintain their lawns, they do the work themselves. Obviously, train services they used to commute to work or delis which they frequented during lunch breaks are experiencing their business shrinking which is in turn leading to more job losses. This sets off a domino effect in which payment slows down and everybody then has problems paying their creditors. The other services that consumers who are anticipating bad news are cutting back on holidays and dining out. All of a sudden, in what are now felt to be hard times, cars, cable TVs and various technical gadgets are becoming a luxury.
In that sense the crisis is indeed changing people’s lifestyles but not always for the worse. The silver lining to it can be seen in having more time on your hands to spend with the family and friends. However, such benefits of unemployment can enjoy only those few whose severance package was generous enough to cushion their fall from the world of work to the “between the jobs status”, as optimists call it. This can indeed be a beginning of the end of consumerism and the belief that buying and selling large quantities of consumer goods is beneficial to an economy. Americans who actually started it all up by substituting plastic for a piggy bank have now realised that they should start saving money for rainy days. Although this realization sank in only after rainy days had set in, it might mark a beginning of a new era.
