Counting Smart Phones and Economic Numbers On the Magnificent Mile
Last week I found myself on Navy Pier in Chicago. Navy pier juts out into Lake Michigan from downtown Chicago and is a wonderful place to recreate, shop and take in the sites. It also gives you a beautiful view of Chicago, especially at night. It is an alive place, full of fun and I highly recommend it.
While doing my rounds of walking the streets of Chicago and Minneapolis last week I had a lot of time to consider things. As many of you know I follow four women around most of the time, which at this stage of life means I do a lot of sitting and waiting. So last week in Chicago I started to count the number of smart phones walking by. Simply put the number of smart phones going by me overwhelmed my senses. It seems at least from the small sample sizes I was taking, a tremendous number of people are addicted to the technology.
I began to think of this last week because of the uneven economic numbers coming out of the United States. Housing starts were about the same as they were in July, which weren’t a good number and many people on economic pages talking about the real specter of a double dip recession in the United States. With their unemployment rate still unacceptably high, the American economy remains in the doldrums compared to its cousin up north. The proverbial question is, when is it going to get better and when will American consumers start spending again?
I know I have a tendency to over analyze these things. For instance some people like watching movies, I like watching professional basketball, farming and analyzing economic numbers. So I like to think I don’t take these numbers a little bit too far. Needless to say, I started to relate these uneven American economic numbers to the number of smart phones I saw on the streets last week in Chicago and Minneapolis. On one hand while the American economists were telling me their economy remains bad, the optics in front of me were telling me everybody with a smart phone were paying the high bills associated with them. What’s up with that?
I asked this question of one of my editors. I told him it didn’t quite add up that I was seeing all the smart phones while at the same time the American economy was not booming and in fact was getting slightly worse. He wrote me back and told me he was in a very high-end restaurant in Birmingham Alabama the other night and he had the same feeling. However he cautioned me by saying that in economic good times may be more high-end restaurants would have more and more people in them. In other words maybe our sample size of him in one high-end restaurant and me on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago didn’t quite add up to a good sample.
I understood what he meant. Still, the optics of seeing almost everybody with a smart phone had me wondering. As many of you know I like to think of myself as being on the ground floor of computer technology. So I’ve had a real fight within myself to accept and embrace Smartphone’s. The reason is their expense, which is like extortion in Canada. Despite my skepticism, it is pretty obvious as I look ahead that many of these people are using this technology to not only cut costs but to make their life better. I read about a recent example of this in a recent USA Today newspaper.
In this article it talked about how transit authorities across the United States and I assume as well in Canada were developing iPhone apps to minimize the transportation snafus amongst their users. In other words people could use their smart phones to see where the nearest transit stop was or how near the next train was to their transit stop. There is also the GPS technology within these phones to make it more efficient mapping for your car through the city or countryside. So users of this technology cut their costs and use their time more efficiently. That’s way different than playing pogo man on your iPhone. It’s adding up to real dollars and it’s obvious at least to the many people I observed in Chicago, it makes sense for them.
The question is how do the optics of all these smart phones sync with the tough US economy? You might argue the “digital divide” just got a little bit wider. The guy holding down a traditional job in the US economy might not necessarily have a smart phone versus the guy who has a smart phone is making money using it. Being able to put it in everybody’s hands might be the perfect storm. That surely will depend on the American economy finally getting back to robust health. The faster that happens, the better.