I'm not quite sure what this means. I'm just hoping it's nothing bad.
My annual week of dork-dom—counting license plates from different states in Marquette during the week leading up to “Art on the Rocks”--is complete, and while this is in no way a scientific survey and in no way is an economic indicator, I'm starting to wonder if people are starting to get worried about their finances.
Why? Because (and once again I stress this is NOT a scientifically accurate survey) this past week I saw the third lowest number of plates from different states in the 20+ years I've been doing this.
Over the past week I saw plates from 28 different states, which for most cities would be an incredible number but for Marquette beats only 2008 (the start of the Great Recession) and 2020 (Covid). Like I said, I don't know if this means anything, but in years when the economy's chugging along and people aren't worried about their finances, I can see plates from almost every single US state and a bunch of Canadian provinces.
But not this year.
Conspicuously missing were plates from most of New England and the West Coast, two areas that usually supply a big chunk of the count, plus a large chunk of the southern US. Also missing were any Canadian plates at all. That's only happened once before—during Covid, when Canadians weren't allowed in the US. Now, Canadians don't feel welcome here, and thanks to that, I didn't see any at all during the week.
Like I said, I don't know what—if anything—this all means. One thing I did note that there were a LOT of plates from nearby states—Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin—which makes me think that maybe people are sticking closer to home these days. The only other state that really stood out on my mind was Arizona, but seeing as how the half of the UP that doesn't winter in Florida winters in Arizona, I'm not too surprised by that.
Once again, I'm not an economist, nor do I play one on TV. Maybe I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time to see plates from the states that I missed, and hopefully, the tourism industry in Marquette is chugging along despite of what I saw (or didn't see). I can't stress enough that this is not a scientific survey; it's just a dork being a dork. That being said...
The number of different states I counted last week was...interesting, to say the least.
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