Remember when you didn’t have to buy a calendar?
The local businesses in your neighborhood, the ones you patronized all year, the businesspeople you knew on a first-name basis, used to give calendars as a thank-you for your patronage.
Well, that has gone the way of the free toaster or blender you used to get from the local bank for opening an account.
“Do you have any 2010 calendars?” I ask the HSBC teller after cashing a check at my local branch in Yonkers, New York.
“Huh?” replies the teller who looks like she was born after the New York Mets’ last World Series title.
“I’ve had an account here for years,” I tell her. “You probably had a crush on Boyz II Men when I started banking here. You used to give out calendars every year.”
“Not me,” she says.
I think she actually thought I was referring to her specifically. So I thank her for attempting to answer my questions and I leave.
Is this the “new normal?”
I should no longer expect a calendar at the end of the year from the local bank, or dry cleaner, or insurance agent, or monolithic cable company, or grocer, or Chinese take-out joint?
Can they no longer afford that act of appreciation?
Or are we all still holding on by our fingernails and trying to survive the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression?
I’m afraid it’s the fingernail answer. Businesses now deem calendars an unnecessary expense.
I remember better days.
I grew up in a poor neighborhood. My brother and I used to go from store to store collecting calendars because that passed for entertainment in the Bed-Stuy section of
(Bed-Stuy is where Spike Lee filmed Do the Right Thing 20 years ago.)
Nobody was rich in Bed-Stuy, otherwise you didn’t live there. But every business gave you a calendar at the end of the year just for asking.
The pet store, even though my parents wouldn’t let us have any more pets after my brother and I put our turtles in the freezer overnight just to see what would happen.
The liquor store. Yeah, they gave us calendars as part of some program to nurture a new generation of bitter, oppressed, alcohol-dependent customers.
The shoe store, the bodega, the Laundromat, the 5- and 10-cent store (now the 99-cent store) and the layaway stores that suckered poor folks into making monthly payments totaling $1,000 for a $400 color TV.
I used to get calendars from all those places.
Not anymore.
My Allstate agent used to mail me a nice refrigerator-magnet calendar.
But what’s the line from that Neil Diamond song?
“Used to be’s don’t count anymore
“They just fall to the floor
“And you sweep them away.”
That I still remember lyrics from a Neil Diamond song may be part of the problem. I remember how much better things used to be and I haven’t adjusted yet to the new normal.
If I want a 2010 calendar, I’m just going to have to buy it myself…after January 1 when it’s 50-percent off and the only ones left in the stores will have those boring pictures of dogs, cats or polar bears.
Happy New Year.
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