A Chat with John Economaki, Founder and President, Br

The other two issues is that we now have the first generation of Americans who probably were exposed to any kind of manual training in high school. If you study human behavior, most of the things you're passionate about happen before you're 21. The seeds are planted before you're 21. So if you're not exposed to wood shop or metal shop or home ec[onomics] or print shop — or any of those hands-on things —you're statistically not going to be interested in them when you turn 40 and have some discretionary funds. So, we're dealing with that. And the other thing is, when I started out 24 years ago, cable television had just gotten started, but there were no cell phones, Internet — in fact, the PC had just come out. You didn't have any of that electronic stuff. And today when you add all that stuff up, it's a couple-thousand bucks per year. And when you're falling into the $40,000 per year income range, that's a chunk of change. Basically, 10 percent of your take home pay goes to those things if you have a cell phone and Internet and cable. The thing that boggles my mind is that iPods have only been out a few years, and they're on generation six. The electronics industry is doing a marvelous job of fishing money out of our pockets, and I don't think anyone realizes what it all adds up to until they realize they can't do anything else.