The Habit of Hoarding

By Scott Sutton, Vice President of Franchising at Sunbrook Academy

Sitting in last week's Emerging Franchisor Conference in Ft. Lauderdale representing Sunbrook Academy, and having the chance to meet with franchise professionals, something occurred to me - while we're all pushing, pulling, clawing and screaming our way out of the recession, what effects, if any, will endure? What habitual changes will wreak havoc on our carefully-conceived recession-busting business plans?

First, some context, the thought occurred to me as the always insightful leader of FranData, Darrell Johnson, began reviewing the current and forecasted lending environment and economic health report. Darrell, as a self-described "recovering lender", has a nose for numbers. His firm does a great job of compiling, analyzing, tracking, reporting and trending key data for the franchising communities. But he added some insight during the conference that took me back a few years to a tense and painful moment with which all families deal, but one in my case that was infused with some humor, thanks to the proclivities of a relative.

My grandmother-in-law, Lucy Roglitz, lived well past her 80th birthday. By all accounts she had a blessed life. So when she passed and the family went about the gloomy business of preparing her former home for sale, we noticed something out of the ordinary, seems that Lucy was a hoarder.

Clustered in her basement, her closets and her storage spaces were countless bundles of socks, shoes, canned goods, blankets, pens, pencils, linens and non-perishable foods, to name a few. Curious about Lucy's hoarding habit, I asked, "What gives?" Without batting an eye, a relative quipped, "Post-depression hoarder, Scott. She's been that way since the 1930s." And was she ever. But it wasn't radios or TVs or lawn flamingos she was hoarding. It was the essentials. The things that would help sustain her and her family in the event another depression rocked America. Fortunately for her, such an era never repeated itself in her lifetime, but her habit of thrift endured .

Back to Darrell. His insight was simply this - has the current recessionary environment irrevocably changed the spending habits of the current consuming generations? Even when the recession melts and we find ourselves in the sunshine of fiscal growth, will consumer conservatism rule the day? The short answer is no one really knows. But a closer look finds the analyst in Darrell referring to the only other economic-challenged time compared to the current recession: the Great Depression.

And in that time, once spend-happy, roaring-twenties consumers switched quickly to a generation of thrift. Can it happen again? No one really knows, but the consensus is that those business plans should account for a somewhat dramatic, long-term change in how post-recession consumers view consumerism. It's the new normal and it's something we will likely contend with until the Millennial Generation expands its purchasing power beyond their weekly allowance.