Bob, my husband, has a friend who owns a pool supplies store here in SW Ohio. He stopped by on Saturday to visit my convalescing-from-knee-surgery husband and I asked him how business was.

"Terrible," Paul said, shaking his head. "There's nothing going on."

"But isn't it the time of year?" I asked.

"No," he replied, "this time of year people are usually at least thinking about opening their pools and beginning to call. This year - nothing." He looked mournful.

"Will you start calling them?" I asked.

"I already have. Many of them are going to open their pools themselves, they say. Many of them are out of work," he added, almost as an after-thought. "They have time to do it themselves."

"Out of work?" I asked.

"Alot of them," he repeated.

"If you had to say, what percentage?" I ask.

He thought for a moment before saying, "One out of three. Yeah," tilting his head and seeming to study the problem more deeply, "one out of three's about right. Around here lots of people are impacted by the car industry. And DHL closing their facility up the road didn't help," he trailed off, looking forlorn. "It's terrible."

"One out of three? That's 33%!" I exclaimed. "You really think it's that high?"

"Out of my customers, yeah, I'd say it's that high. My '08 hot-tub sales were off 90% over '07. Most of our income comes from the services we provide opening, maintaining and closing pools along with the chemicals we sell. We've been bustin' our asses to make our numbers," he added.

"That's worse than the depression unemployment numbers," I commented.

"Well, who thinks this isn't worse than the Depression?" he shot back.

"How does that work - them opening their own pools?" I asked, trying to change the subject to something a little less painful.

"Not too good," he answered. "Very few of them really know how to do it and even less of them get it right. They'll be callin' us to fix somethin' or other that they destroy in the process, for the most part," he volunteered. "It'd be cheaper for them to have us keep on doing what we ordinarily have done in the past - that way they don't have to pay for repairs."

"Makes sense," I said, thinking to myself that this lesson applies across all industries and is something we all should be mindful of.

"That's kind of a silver lining, then, isn't it?" I asked.

Paul looked at me and grinned.
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