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In Farm Country's Boom, Hints of a Bubble
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High fuel prices are pushing people in Blair to consider other options, said Paul Cech, chief financial officer of Woodhouse Auto Family, a dealership in Blair. "But at the end of the day, you can't throw a bunch of equipment in the back of a Ford Fusion."
Those sales, too, have been helped by lower rates. The typical bank auto loan for someone with good credit is a full percentage point less than it was a year ago, Cech said, which reduces the monthly payment on a typical vehicle he sells by about $20.
"Have you seen Truck Mountain?" asks Cech, referring to the rows of pickup trucks, up and down a hill. "Pretty impressive, huh?" If those sales trends were to reverse, the thousands of trucks in inventory on Truck Mountain could become more burden than selling point.
On the main drag, business at Fernando's Cafe and Cantina, one of the recent additions to a once-desolate downtown, is up 10 percent over last year.
The strong sales environment is helping trigger new long-term investment. Wal-Mart has scaled back on its expansion plans nationally, but it is in negotiations to build a new store in Blair, which is about 35 miles northwest of Omaha. Several other retailers are opening nearby.
This isn't Blair's first retail boom. "The '70s, those were some good years," said Realph, who is also a farmer, real estate broker and seller of crop insurance. "Everybody was making money."
Then that commodities boom ended with a thud, as prices plummeted in the early-1980s. "We lost all our main street businesses," Realph said, sitting at his desk as agricultural prices on the Chicago Board of Trade flash on a flat-screen monitor up on a shelf, interspersed with weather maps. "We lost a lot of the people who were coming into Blair to buy things. We used to have a Penney's, you know."
He is proud of the new prosperity but cautious. "There are no straight-line graphs," Realph said. "Things just don't go up forever. I don't know when this will end, or whether it will be bad when it does, but this will go the other way."
