Recession Notes

Checked Out. Their accounts may be empty, but many consumers write checks anyway during periods of recession and inflation. Their intention often is to try to get to the bank with money before a merchant turns in the check. More consumers are now losing the race. In Dallas County, Texas, bad checks for $200 or less nearly doubled between January 1974 and January of this year. In Atlanta, the amount of debt that never gets collected has increased 20% to 25% in the past six months or so. Most of it is made up of bad checks written for small amounts to discount department stores.

Reading Rise. In many towns the new In place for free information and entertainment is the public library. "It is a truism among librarians that the Great Depression saw a tremendous rise in people coming into public libraries, and we believe this is happening to some extent again," says Larry Molumby, a public library administrator in Washington, D.C. Books on how to pass exams or learn skills are more popular than ever before. In San Francisco, the city library's head of public information has noticed a sharp increase in demand for histories of the Depression. The staff has also been taught the meaning of such recondite phrases as "GNP implicit price deflator" (the nation's most comprehensive price index) by securities brokers who come in to look up reference publications no longer subscribed to by their thrift-minded firms.

Annual Beatings. An oddball stockholder bristling with poison-tipped questions has disturbed many an annual meeting in the past, but usually he or she has badgered management alone.

This year, warned Touche Ross & Co., a major New York accounting firm, stockholders worried by the recession would show up in force and ask tough, possibly angry questions. To help such clients as Sears, Roebuck & Co., Boeing and Prudential Insurance, Touche Ross put together a memo warning management to expect sharp queries in three main areas: the ability of the company to cope with such business conditions as liquidity shortages, the management of corporate assets, and the reliability of the firm's financial reports. Early meetings have borne out the predictions. At last week's annual meeting of Touche Ross Client Chrysler Corp., 650 shareholders peppered management with some questions that the accountants had not included in their forecast. Among them: Would Chairman Lynn Townsend agree to resign? The answer: No.

Trash Slash. A steady downward trend has been established by one of the economy's more esoteric indicators: garbage collections. Consumers buying fewer goods have less to throw out; sluggish industrial activity is reflected in less waste. In the first three months of 1975, Chicago sanitation workers picked up 200,000 fewer tons than in the first quarter of 1974. Conspicuously absent are the usual numbers of discarded major appliances such as stoves, washing machines and refrigerators. New York City's household and construction wastes dwindled by nearly 1 million tons in 1974, and continue to diminish in 1975. Pickings are slimmer in the Atlanta area too. In Fulton County, Ga., because of factory shutdowns, refuse production by industries has slipped 80% in the past eight months.

Fat of the Land. With a vast field of job seekers to survey, some employers now pay careful attention to factors other than professional qualifications. "If two people are equal," Atlanta Personnel Consultant Neale Traves tells his job-hunting clients, "invariably the employer will take the guy with the clean-cut All-American look." A case in point: a former clerk in Los Angeles complains that prospective employers have demanded that she have her Afro hairstyle straightened and that she remove the gold earring from her nose. Overweight people, in particular, feel that they are being squeezed out of the job market. In a recent survey of 1,000 heavies conducted by Dr. Rudolf Noble, a San Francisco obesity specialist, 14.2% claimed that their weight was preventing them from landing jobs.

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