Monday, 7/30

I hope this doesn't mean anything, because if it does, we could be in big trouble.

As you may recall, I spent all of last week being a bigger dork than usual. It was my annual week of seeing how many different state license plates I could come across here in Marquette. I've been doing it during the week preceding Art on the Rocks for almost two decades now, which proves two things—that I've build up quite a data set to compare things year to year, and that I really need to get a life.

REALY need to get a life.

Anyway, this year I saw license plates from 38 different states (and Ontario), which is not a bad number, but it's down almost 20 percent from last year, when I ended up missing only four states in total. That caused me to look back at the data I've collected, and that's what worries me a little—the only other year I had a drop of 20% was 2008, right before the economy imploded and the Great Recession hit.

I'm hoping history doesn't repeat itself.

Now, this isn't a scientific survey; it's not statistically valid, nor is it rigorously controlled. It's just me marking down license plates as I'm out and about for the week. So I could be totally wrong in what I see. But I spent the whole time doing what I do during a typical Art on the Rocks week, and yet saw few states than I usually see. And like I said, the only other time that happened was right before the Great Recession. I'm not saying one leads to the other. I'm just saying that's what happened then.

The one thing I did find interesting was that while I saw fewer states this year, I think I saw more out-of-state cars than normal. It seems like every third or fourth car in downtown Marquette was bearing out-of-state plates, which you cold consider a good thing. I do know that, at least through May, tourism numbers are way up in Marquette. So maybe what I saw was just a blip. While I didn't see as many states as usual, the states I did see were represented in greater numbers (even places like Tennessee, which surprised me). So people are traveling to Marquette. They're just not traveling from states like either of the Dakotas, South Carolina, Louisiana, Idaho, Nebraska, Kansas, or any of the other plates that went unseen this year (even, for some reason, Nevada, which I usually see in the double digits).

So my week of looking at license plates is over, and I now longer have to swivel my head to look at every single car that goes by. And I'm hoping that what happened in 2008 does not happen again. However, if the U.S. economy does something weird in the next few months, you'll have at least one sign it was going to happen.

Keep your fingers crossed it doesn't.

(jim@wmqt.com)