Every day I drive to work, I go past two completely new, but completely unused, "boxes." They were supposed to be Eckerd drug stores, but a few weeks into construction, Eckerd was sold to two companies. Neither company wanted the stores in New Mexico or Colorado. There were six of these new buildings going up at the time of Eckerd's sale.

Because the stores were built and would be leased by local contracting companies to Eckerd, the buildings were completed and are still owned by the contracting companies. Since it wasn't just one contracting company building the boxes, the loss has been spread over a couple of companies. As far as I can tell, no other company has jumped on the opportunity to take over these buildings. They've been completed for a few months now.

Now we're realizing this huge economic recovery has been slowed to a drip. Why is this? Why was everyone wrong? There were these great forecasts by everyone about job growth and consumer spending, and it's all been proven wrong over the last few months.

When I drive past the empty boxes every day, I begin to understand what happened. Everyone got really excited. Like there was suddenly more money in the pot and the pot was gonna get filled up exponentially in short order. They built these six boxes, giving people jobs for two months. We traded ongoing jobs (say up to 50 a store, until the stores closed down--at least two years) for a couple of months of construction work.

I'm sure the construction workers appreciated the work, but they knew it was only a couple of months. They're on another job now, but if they are still working for the same contractors, things might be a little tight. Those contracting companies own empty buildings that don't make any money. How many people will lose their jobs because the new owners of Eckerd didn't want to be in the New Mexico market? How many people didn't get jobs they really needed because the stores never opened?

To get a strong economy, you have to give people jobs. You have to make sure more people are spending the money they earn. The more people with jobs, the more money moves around. When people don't have a job, they can't spend money. It seems simple, but no one talking about the economy seems to get it.

When you give money to people who already have a lot of money (i.e. tax cuts for the top 1%), this does not spread the money around. It does not give them incentive to create more jobs and give the money to people with less. In a general sense (because there are always exceptions), people I've met with money seem to think they don't have enough. They have way more than me, but it's not enough. People who have less money than me think they will have more money someday. They use credit like they have more than they actually do--so they are spending their future pay. They are counting on the people with money to give them more money in the future.

At our 401K meeting at work last week, people were very concerned about the amount of money they were making off their "investments." In most cases, the amount of money is nothing (less than $15K--which, if you consider taking that money out of the 401K early would cost you about half that, isn't much to retire on). The amount of money earned over the last quarter, in my case, was about $12. I was doing good, by the way. Not the best, of course.

The person in the company doing the best is the owner of the company. Of course, he already has more money than everyone else. It's always easier to make money from money than from nothing.

Has our company contributed to the job creation in this country? No. We have cut our work force by a third. It means people are doing more work for pretty much the same money.

Is this wrong? Not necessarily. If the company goes under, we all lose our jobs. Having a smaller payroll helps to keep the jobs we still have. And we need these jobs. Does it make us feel better about our jobs or our life? Not necessarily. We're working harder, and we're struggling just the same as a year ago. It just means more of our life is consumed by our jobs than before.

What are we living for? Is there a deserted tropical island paradise waiting for us when we finally make the big big money? Is there a better life waiting once we've done the work of the man? No. There is, maybe, solvency in twenty years. Not really a great picture to look forward to.

And so seeing the empty boxes every day is kind of a mixed blessing. There is triumph and failure all wrapped up in earth tone paint and cinder blocks. But where can I find a true representation of success?

Matt Worley has no retirement plans--they'd pretty much be called irrational dreams by most people.