As a teenager in the mid-1980s, David VanderMolen's job was to buy and install holiday
lights for his family's Charlotte, Michigan home. Each year his parents would give him
$10, enough for two 35-light strings, each 20 feet long, from Kmart. If the weather
wasn't too bad, a string of lights would last about three years. VanderMolen eventually
built up a collection of 350 miniature lights, enough to make his house the most
elaborately decorated in the neighborhood.
Today, that display would be nothing special. You can buy a 100-light string, nearly 50
feet long, for $2.44 at Wal-Mart. Even without adjusting for inflation, VanderMolen's
old $10 annual budget would cover more lights in a single year than he could accumulate
over seven years in the 1980s. Today's cheaper lights, mostly made in China, also last
longer.
A holiday-lighting dollar simply goes further than it used to. Homeowners buying
Christmas lights benefit from the same intense retail and manufacturing competition that
have driven down prices and improved reliability in so many other industries, raising
the American standard of living.
Her second point is about the increased number of service jobs, and the productive
efficiency thereby achieved.
Christmas D�cor, based in Lubbock, Texas, has more than 350 franchise locations
throughout the U.S. and Canada. The company estimates that its franchisees do more than
$32 million in holiday light business a year. (At least four other national companies
offer similar franchises.) Most franchisees are landscaping companies looking for ways
to keep working through the slow winter months.
More and more homeowners are contracting out the lighting work, creating satisfying jobs
that never existed before. It's part of the long-term trend toward greater and greater
specialization. The business also illustrates just how experience improves productivity
even in service industries.
Her third point is that it is not a waste of money to create beauty, or to specialize in
what one produces.
That disparaging attitude toward aesthetics affects us not only as consumers deciding
where to spend our money but as citizens trying to understand the sources of future
economic growth. We mourn the loss of manufacturing jobs--"real jobs"--and ignore
growing aesthetic professions, from installing holiday lights and landscaping lawns to
giving manicures and facials, from designing brochures to crafting granite countertops.
...The service appeals more to baby boomers than to the over-60 crowd, who tend to
believe that hiring someone to install holiday lights is frivolous.
This is a good article for an economics class. I think I'll send it to my G601 class,
even though the course is done with. It is a nice complement to the snow-plow question on my
final exam that I wrote about on December 15.
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