Crash the mall
2:05 CT.
The photo below is from the Wachovia ATM at Willowbrook Mall in northwest Houston. It was showing the Windows failed boot screen. About half the stores at the mall were open, lest people go without emergency personalized gravy boats, Abercrombie logo shirts, and Bluetooth headets. The snake oil salesmen working from carts were pushier than usual. The Vonage cart was closed down. I don’t envy being the VoIP salesman two days after a hurricane when we were reminded why landlines are still useful. I saw a woman sitting on a bench charging her cell phone and laptop. Smart.
There were strangely few people at the mall or at any restaurants. This seems illogical to me. On the supply side, only some fraction, perhaps a third, of area restaurants were open. Grocery stores are still getting resupplied with perishable goods. Refrigerators were off long enough that anything fresh had to be thrown out. On the demand side, many people are still without power, most people are staying home from work, and everyone’s doing enough physical labor to work up a healthy appetite. And in addition, no power means no AC, and since the restaurants are all air conditioned, you’d think that it might be an additional reason for people to go out. So you might think, then, that the supply of restaurants is down and the demand for restaurant-cooked food is up. So why are there not lines out the door? I have asked the Blog of Diminishing Returns to take up this question.
On the radio, State Farm and Allstate are running ads telling their customers how to get in touch. KTRH, a local AM news station, is doing an ice giveaway downtown. The anchor asked the correspondent why a radio station could get (don’t quote me on these numbers) 30,000 pounds of ice to people in need before FEMA could. This paper by Russell Sobel and Peter Leeson offers a good framework with which to answer this question.
Houston is getting better, but Galveston still has a lot of work ahead of it. They’ve just got the first water back online, and that’s only to the hotel that the local government is using as a base camp. People are being kept off the island, and people still on the island are being encouraged to leave. There’s a long way for the city to go.
