Monday, 7/29

I hope this isn't an omen. I hope it's just a statistical blip. Because if it isn't, we may be screwed.

I finished my annual dorky habit of counting license plates during Art on the Rocks week yesterday, and in the seven days I did it I counted license plates from 35 states, one Canadian province, and, believe it or not, Guatemala. That's not a bad total: if nothing else, it proves Marquette is a great tourist destination. In fact, according to local officials tourism is up around eight percent this year.  However, my weird little count is down almost 20 percent from the last two years, when I was only missing plates from a handful of states. The only other time it's ever dropped that much between years was during the 2008 count, right before the economy crashed and the Great Recession began.

Yikes.

Now, as I say every year, this is not a scientific survey. It's me writing down whatever plates I happen to see when I'm out doing my stuff for the week. I've been doing it the same way for the almost 20 years I've been counting; I go the same places and walk the same streets, so it does lend itself to a little continuity and a good baseline for side-by-side comparison, but it certainly is NOT a scientific survey and certainly, aside from perhaps a weird statistical coincidence, has nothing to do with the state of the U.S. economy.

So the fact that the license plate count dropped by a big chunk the same weekend the Commerce Department said economic growth dropped by almost 30 percent in the second quarter of 2019 is just another weird statistical coincidence, right?

RIGHT?

I did notice three interesting things about this year's count. The first is that there seem to have been just as many, if not more, cars in Marquette during the week. The place was packed, and there were cars everywhere you looked. So Marquette's tourism economy is obviously thriving, as evidenced by the eight percent increase in hotel bookings this year . But I'm guessing that a lot of those visitors and a lot of those cars were from the big three—Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Those are the plates you see in Marquette every single week of the year. This week, I think, you just saw a whole lot more of them.  So maybe they're just crowding out visitors from other states farther away

The second interesting thing? The lower number of plates seemed to come in large measure because of both the East Coast (with one huge exception) and the Rocky Mountain states (with one huge exception).  As far as the East Coast goes I did see plates for New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, but there were a LOT of states I usually see that I didn't this year, ranging down the coast from Maine to Delaware. I have no idea why; if we're subscribing to the economic theory of this count maybe, just maybe, it means people are spending less and saving money by staying a little closer to home this year.

Of course, that doesn't explain the third thing I noticed. I saw more plates from two states—Colorado and Virginia, the two exceptions I mentioned before—than I did from any other state aside from the big three. I have no idea why those two states would be better represented than Minnesota or Ohio or Indiana or other nearby states, but they were. In fact, over the weekend I think I saw more Virginia plates than almost every other state.  Another state that caught my eye a lot?  Tennessee was a bit of a surprise, seeing as how I usually only see one or two vehicles from the state. This week, I saw dozens.  Maybe Marquette was written up in a Nashville or Memphis paper? I don't think any local marketing dollars were spent down there; maybe I'm wrong about that, though.

It wouldn't be the first time.

So that's the report from this year's count. Like I said, the number of states was down quite a bit, but there's probably nothing behind that, especially because in Marquette overall tourism numbers are up. At least we hope there's nothing behind it the weird statistical blip.  We hope that the drop this year is, unlike 2008, just one of those freaky things that comes when you're doing an unscientific survey like this one. Because if there actually is something to it, you may not want to look at your 401K statement for the next year or two.

Keep your fingers crossed.

(jim@wmqt.com)