There have been lots of charts and graphs and stimulus packages and home foreclosures and Wall Street crashes and bailouts, but it wasn't until today I knew the recession was the real deal, thanks to the A1 centerpiece of the Columbus Dispatch.
The horrifying news? Ohio's vanity plate market has tanked.
Sure, a lot of newspapers would have made the editorial error of burying this story in the Metro page or even (gasp!) the Life section. (Assuming your paper has a Life section or Metro section. Or that it's still in operation at all.) Not the brave souls at the Dispatch. They know Ohio's vanity license plate market is an unmatched economic bellweather.
And while other newspapers might make the mistake of assigning this story to some poor Ohio University intern who made a questionable career choice, not the Dispatch. Nope, at the Dispatch only a story as riveting as the collapse of the vanity plate industry can bring out the big gun: Managing Editor Ben Marrison.
Marrison pulls no punches with this hard-hitting feature, letting us know right up front things are not good in the Buckeye state:
With the recession forcing people to pinch pennies harder, more and more Ohioans are dropping their expensive plates in favor of the lower-cost, standard-issue variety.
What's that? You're not buying this well-crafted assumption? You're under the impression that people will cut back on their groceries, their utilities, attend Columbus State instead of Ohio State, but never, never give up their personalized plates?
Marrison douses the doubter with hard-hitting facts.
According to Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles records, Ohioans applied for 42,500 new vanity plates last year. However, because even more people dropped the special plates, the overall total fell by 277 vehicles. Last year's drop marked the first time in three years that sales fell for vanity plates - those with the logo of a college, a charitable cause, initials or words spelled in license-plate code.
That's right, Mr. Skeptic. Requests for specialized plates dropped by .6 percent.
Let that sink in. These are numbers that cannot be ignored.
Then Marrison drops the real bomb. Ohio is going to hell and the state does not even care.
Lindsay Komlanc, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety, said the state doesn't study the reasons behind fluctuations in vanity or specialized plates.
"We do not have a mechanism for tracking why people are doing the things they're doing," she said, explaining that the bureau of motor vehicles is required to make plates based on legislation approved by the General Assembly.
Marrison wraps it up letting us know that this issue affects many of our Buckeye brethren.
"The most popular plates are those defined as "personalized," those on which people mix letters and numbers to spell out messages, such as CUL8R or BUCKEYE. Last year, nearly 330,000 vehicles had personalized plates, up 70 percent since 2001. Those with initials alone totaled 118,627 last year, up 24 percent during the same period."
Marrison didn't need to add - "For NOW" - to make his salient point.
I don't know if Ben Marrison has a personalized plate. But if it does, I'm guessing it says "BM - HERO."
