Food, Home and Style
Recession Concessions: Lost the Business, Keeping the Cleaners
Ryan M. Salinetti, 33
Suffolk County, N.Y.
Keeping: Cleaners
I’ve kept my cleaning people because I love them and I don’t want to see them suffer the way I have.
Letting Go: Employees, childcare, extras
I have a graphic design business [Breakwater Design Studio] that works with locals and local businesses. They did not just go into hibernation for the off-season—I drive down Main Street and see For Rent signs in the windows. There was a wine merchant who was doing excellent; I worked with him for six months on a website project and now he’s gone. Landscapers—their clients were V.P.s for Lehman Bros., and they were the first to get chopped. I do their graphics and marketing, so I got chopped next. It happened in three weeks. I had to lay people off. I gave up the idea that I could have a business, I moved everything home. It was horrible.
We’ve stopped shopping at the local markets and joined a Price Club. I’m not buying Clinique anymore, I go to the drugstore. I’m cutting back on little things that I never would have considered frivolous before—things we felt like we deserved. Music, books.
I have a one-year-old son, and one of the great things about this recession is that I have all this extra time to spend with him…cutting back on childcare costs.
Tags: business, entrepreneurs, Food, Home and Style, Recession Concessions, spending, Spending and Saving Discussion
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I can definitely relate. I made a list of 30 things we could cut if things got bad. Within 3 months we’d done all of them. We swapped German cars for used Japanese, dropped club memberships that we rarely used, cut back on videos whether rentals, NetFlix or on-demand, switched from canned sodas to 2-liter bottles. Unfortunately we eventually had to let our cleaning people go. That was terrible but we couldn’t afford it any more. The ripple effect of this economy goes far beyond the official unemployment rate.