Welcome to summer.
What’s that you say? Summer is still a few weeks away? It won’t begin until the third week in June?
Don’t tell that to college students, who are already either on vacation or engaged in seasonal employment. Don’t tell it to the tourism industry, which has already switched over to higher prices and started calculating its seasonal take. Don’t tell it to fashionistas, who have already brought the white pants, shoes and accessories out of mothballs and started sporting their seasonal attire.
Summer may not officially begin until the rays of the sun directly strike the Tropic of Cancer but its unofficial kickoff is the Memorial Day weekend. Likewise, it doesn’t officially end until the autumnal equinox but its unofficial conclusion is the Labor Day weekend.
Between now and Sept. 1 (the earliest possible date on which Labor Day can fall), we’ll find out just how much an ailing economy will hurt or help New Jersey this year as it rolls out its many summer attractions.
Conventional wisdom holds that a sinking economy sinks all ships, with the singular exception of those anchored at the Jersey Shore. There, it is said, the only factor that can make the busy summer season unprofitable is bad weather. Otherwise, the $23 billion tourism economy almost always has clear sailing, having proven over more than a century that it is both inflation-proof and recession-proof.
The summer of 2008 is shaping up as a true test of whether this conventional wisdom still holds.
On the bright side, many shore businesses are reporting little or no downturn in home rentals, motel and hotel bookings, restaurant reservations and other early indicators of seasonal demand. With the price of gasoline approaching $4 a gallon, more distant summer resorts may be out of reach for residents of New Jersey and nearby states. But more than a quarter of the nation’s population lives just a gas tank away from the Jersey Shore, making it an easy and affordable destination even in these tough economic times.
The big question is: Will the folks who vacation closer to home this summer make up for those who used to come here from farther away? And, more important, will they stay long enough, and spend enough money while they’re here, to keep the shore economy humming along?
The answer at this point is still partly cloudy. While motel and hotel owners report high reservation rates, requests for two- or three-day rentals are up, but the demand for weekly rentals is down. A common concern among Shore business owners is that visitors will forgo the usual weeklong or two-week summer holiday this year for briefer overnight stays or, worse, day trips. They’ll pack their own picnic lunches, rather than dining out, and they’ll hold on to their pocket change instead of spending it on T-shirts, salt water taffy and other boardwalk souvenirs.
These kinds of expenses may be marginal to consumers but to retailers whose livelihoods are made or broken between Memorial Day and Labor Day, they can literally spell the difference between a black bottom line and a red one. So it is largely on the basis of economic considerations such as these gasoline prices, length of stay, out-of-pocket expenses that the summer of 2008 will turn out to be a boom or bust at the Jersey Shore.
Oh, and don’t forget the one variable that may be most important of all, a condition produced not by the economy but by climatology and which we should all wish for in abundance all summer long:
Sunshine.
