The U.S. economy this year was strong and scary and not at all normal.
Growth surged, then stalled, then rebounded. Jobs were there for the taking. But not everyone wanted to — or was able to — return to work. The price of items such as lumber and used cars galloped higher at a pace most people had never experienced.
The U.S. economy this year is turning in its best performance since 1984, when Ronald Reagan proclaimed it “morning again in America.” Businesses are producing more goods and services than before the coronavirus pandemic, but doing so with about 4 million fewer workers. The economy is running so hot that the Federal Reserve this month took its first steps toward slowing things down, even as many downtown office towers remain vacant.
“We don’t look at this as a classic recovery,” said Paul Gruenwald, global chief economist for S&P Global Ratings. “We’re learning this as we go.”
Now, the climate is shifting again. In 2022, the economy will get less stimulus from government spending and the Fed’s easy-money policies, easing pressure on the supply bottlenecks that have clogged ports and rail yards. That combination should eventually take inflation off the boil.
But no one knows how the pandemic will affect next year. Few people even know how it will affect next week.
“There’s a tendency to take 2021 and expect a carbon copy in ’22. That’s not going to be the case,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist with Oxford Economics. “The drivers of economic activity will be very different.”
Across the country, Americans battled through a historic pandemic, trying to find their way back to more familiar terrain. A car salesman in Houston enjoyed a boom but wondered whether it would last. A Boston ballerina shed tears of joy as she returned to the stage. And a Wisconsin trucker was forced to park his $195,000 rig to wait for a simple aluminum part caught in a tangled supply chain.
Theirs are tales of perseverance and adaptation, resilience and triumph. These are their stories.
Joe Zeidan, Houston
“You see that 2018 Nissan Altima sitting out there?” asked Joe Zeidan, who owns Z Auto Place, a used-car business in west Houston.
“I sold that car two years ago for $15,000. Last month, the owner brought it back to trade it in on another car. I had to pay him $17,500 for it. Now it’s back on my lot, and I’m selling it for $18,500. That’s how crazy the car business is.”
Zeidan, 63, came to the United States from his native Lebanon in 1977 to attend the University of Houston. He graduated with a degree in engineering and has been selling used cars ever since, from inexpensive first cars to Maseratis and Lamborghinis. He has never seen anything like the rabid search for used cars that exists in this wild, woolly and unpredictable pandemic-rebound economy.
Customers are back, and prices are up. Way up. Zeidan estimates his business is up 50% over 2020.
“It’s really out of control. I can’t find enough cars to sell,” he explained, sitting at the desk in his small office.
“I give it another six or seven months. But you never know.”
Lia Cirio, Boston
The Snow Queen hadn’t danced before a live audience in 20 months. As she waited backstage for the Boston Ballet’s first performance of “The Nutcracker” to begin, Lia Cirio felt a swirl of emotions. The theater was packed, the anticipation palpable.
Two hours and many leaps later, she couldn’t hold back: “I cried tears of joy.”
For artists such as Cirio, a principal dancer and choreographer with the company, the pandemic threatened not just livelihoods, but their very reasons for being. She remembers the date: March 12, 2020, the opening night of “Carmen.” She had the lead role. “I didn’t understand what COVID was. I thought it’d be a week or two.” Then the rest of the season got canceled.
“At first I did the ‘barre in my kitchen’ thing,” Cirio said, but soon she realized how long it might be before the company took the stage again. “I let my body heal, which it hadn’t done in a long time.” She isolated with her dance partner and dived into creative projects, including choreographing and recording new dances. She posted the videos on Instagram.
In September 2020, the Boston Ballet debuted its first virtual season.
The dancers finally resumed full rehearsals this fall. After practicing for so long in small pods and via Zoom, she relishes being together.
As with so many ballerinas, Cirio’s dream began with “The Nutcracker,” which she first saw when she was 3. She is now 35 and in her 18th year with the company. She is thrilled that the audiences have returned in force. And as she pirouettes in a fantasyland of gently falling snowflakes, they watch her in spellbound silence.
“Being onstage again,” she said, “has been a really powerful feeling.”
Kailey Kernick, Miami
Kailey Kernick knew she was in trouble when yet another luxury-label boutique moved into Miami’s most chichi shopping area this month.
“They just opened a Chanel store a week ago,” she said. “And so that’s going to be dangerous for me.”
The 24-year-old’s admission came just outside of the Louis Vuitton store in the Miami Design District, a downtown destination where she spends a lot of time and a lot of money. Around her, men and women stepped out of Bentleys and Benzes to peruse windows with glittery displays of gold, diamonds and silk — no tinsel or faux baubles in sight.
“Dior is my favorite thing. And I love Chanel. I have an insane shopping addiction,” Kernick said.
It’s an addiction she can afford, thanks to the supercharged cryptocurrency trading that has transformed and empowered her world.
Two years ago, she was in her hometown near Calgary, working as a waitress and living paycheck to paycheck, she said. “I barely had any savings.”
The coronavirus hit, and she lost her job and decided to head south. After a brief stop in Los Angeles and another low-wage position at a mortgage broker, Kernick arrived in Miami in early 2021 and started trading cryptocurrency, something she’d been studying for a few years.
“I’ve been lucky to run with people that are just killing it in the industry, and we have a community,” she said. “I know it’s like gambling, but it’s smarter gambling, depending on how you play it. You’ve got to be smart with this.”
She and her friends have quadrupled their investments this year, according to Kernick. They’re all enjoying luxe lifestyles — the kind that Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is promoting as he tries to turn the city into a cryptocurrency trading center.
“I think life manifests itself in the way you live it. I live the life I want to live, and I’m just going to keep inviting more luxury and abundance,” Kernick said. “You attract what you give out to the world.”
Blanche Richardson, Oakland
Blanche Richardson still works seven days a week at the business her parents founded about six decades ago — the business decorated on the outside by a 10-foot-tall block-long bookshelf mural, the business visited over the years by luminaries such as Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali, the business that is the oldest African American-owned bookstore in the country.
She’s tired, though there’s no question of walking away. Marcus Books, named for Black activist Marcus Garvey, remains her mission.
“It’s essential that any culture, any community has its own source of knowledge,” Richardson said. “For the Black community, this is it.”
The past two years have been challenging. When the pandemic forced shutdowns in California, the bookstore’s supporters responded with fundraising efforts and waves of phone orders to help keep it afloat.
But when George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, triggering protests in cities across the country and painful introspection among many Americans, the bookshop became a key destination for people not just in its Oakland neighborhood but throughout the Bay Area.
She is gratified that the store hasn’t had deliveries badly delayed by this fall’s trucking and supply chain issues. Its shelves are full again, with James Baldwin’s essays and Audre Lorde’s poetry, biographies of Stacey Abrams and Nipsey Hussle, works of Afrofuturism and more. Richardson curates the offerings — about 3,000 titles — for their relevance to people of color. A majority are by Black authors.
“We find that people will now turn to us to order things they could very well get at another bookstore,” she said. Many tell her, “I didn’t want to shop at Amazon.”
Mike Nichols, Cedar Rapids, Iowa
After pulling countless trailers of grain across the country during the pandemic, Mike Nichols’s truck was, at last, sitting still.
Parked at the shop, it needed a routine part — a length of aluminum tubing — just as the trucking industry was gripped by a parts shortage.
“Even the supply chain is affected by the supply chain,” said Nichols, 54, as he waited at his home in central Wisconsin. “It’s a week without revenue, so that hurts. But you need breaks, too, now and then.”
When truck traffic dipped in 2020, he had kept rolling, crisscrossing the country with 25-ton loads of grain. Corn from Iowa. Rice from Arkansas. Malted barley from Minnesota.
Yet now, trucks are crowding the interstates, heavy with the goods fueling a pandemic consumer binge.
At night, trucks pack rest areas and truck stops, their drivers urged off the road by their ELDs — electronic logging devices — for federally mandated rest breaks, usually 10 hours. The Federal Highway Administration calls the truck parking shortage “severe” and has labeled it “a national safety concern.”
“You work all day, putting in 14 hours, and then you have to worry about where you are going to park your bed,” he said. “It’s almost like being homeless.”
Christine Hilborn, Fort Lupton, Colo.
Dodging tumbleweeds, Christine Hilborn’s granddaughter slid between the rungs of an iron gate, tiptoed around piles of poop and stopped under a chestnut-colored horse’s dusty belly.
“He sees me!” the 4-year-old shouted.
“Honey, he can’t see you there,” Hilborn replied, catching up and moving her in front of the animal. That lasted just a moment as the little girl giggled, pivoted in her pink sequined sneakers and dashed out of the corral. Hilborn watched her unruly curls disappear behind a horse trailer and smiled: “Everything’s a celebration.”
This month, as her extended family faced a child-care crisis exacerbated by the pandemic, Hilborn, 50, left her job as a foster-care case manager to watch both of her granddaughters — Lavina and her 7-year-old sister, Naveyh. Her decision came after 20 exhausting months of juggling work, online school for the older girl and babysitting for their mother, Michaela Lewis. They and Hilborn’s other daughter share a rented mobile home in Fort Lupton, in the heart of Colorado’s oil patch.
“It’s a huge adjustment,” Hilborn said. She misses her time with the parents and youngsters she helped support in the foster-care system. She also misses the $1,000 a month she gave up in income.
Inside their home on the windswept plain, Lavina carried a patient orange tabby around and around the kitchen island. Her mother, who cleans houses, worked nights during the early months of the pandemic, keeping an eye on the girls during the day while Hilborn handled evening duty. But when Lewis’s hours changed with a new job, Hilborn started taking Lavina to her office. That arrangement fell apart quickly.
Then, in September, Hilborn and Lavina had to isolate in the master bedroom after the three others got COVID-19. Once everyone recovered, the plan was to enroll Lavina in a day care, but it had a waiting list. So Hilborn resigned.
“I wanted to do it,” she said. “But at times it’s all so overwhelming.”