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The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!
If you believe our mainstream media, the housing market has collapsed and everyone who wants to buy a house should be sitting on the sidelines, licking their chops, waiting to pick up houses for a faint whisper of their asking price. Don’t be stupid. The Greenwich market is okay, and won’t be going anywhere drastic in the foreseeable future. Proof? Eleven houses went to contract on just one day: Friday, August 26. List prices were all over the place, but started at $8,000,000, and ranged down through the $5.9s, $4.9s. etc. People are buying houses here in town; always have, always will. I’ve seen nothing to indicate a fire sale; rather, unrealistic prices have dropped and when they do, they sell. A house that sees a one million dollar price change may cause you to think that the bottom has fallen out but in fact, even a year ago, when the market was robust, many of us probably thought that the price was crazily out of line. Wall Street is enjoying record earnings, bonuses are huge, houses will sell. No one wants to overpay but, if I had to make a generalization, it’s newcomers who are lobbing ridiculous low-ball bids at houses while long time residents, having seen all the cycles and learned that Greenwich prices don’t fall away to nothing, are buying what they want, at rational prices. What with mad Mullahs in Iran planning a nuclear Holocaust and the prospect of Alcee Hastings, the impeached federal judge (bribery) heading our country’s House Intelligence Committee if the Democrats win this November, folks should be nervous about the future. But if you need a house now, this isn’t a bad time to buy.

Revenge!
Family legend has it that my great grandmother on my mother’s side, a sweet, gentle lady from New Orleans who wouldn’t have dreamed of ever uttering profanity, invariably referred to Northerners as “damnyankees”. Her bitter memories of the Civil War may be eased a bit with the news that Kudzu, “the vine that ate the South”, has appeared in Greenwich. This stuff is just awful, according to a Wall Street Journal article I remember reading long ago. It grows incredibly fast, consumes everything it encounters, resists every attempt to eradicate it and now it’s here. Lucky us; I hope my great grandmother is placated.

Speaking of Revenge
When CVS first showed up in town, it bought out and closed down almost all the local pharmacies so as to eliminate competition. Riverside Pharmacy’s owners were told, basically, “we buy you out or we beat you out” so Tony and Marshall sold out and retired. I resented losing two guys who’d known me since I was an infant and when Walgreen’s opened I happily shifted my business there, instead of to CVS. But there’s
always been a problem: Walgreen’s computer database already has a Chris Fountain in its records, an undoubtedly fine, upstanding citizen of Bridgeport. Prescriptions meant for me are assigned to him, doing neither of us any good. I have always been able to correct the confusion before but recently, on the eve of a vacation (you’ll notice the sparcity of real estate news in this column – sorry) I showed up to pick up an order and was told, “sorry, you’re the wrong Chris Fountain”. “No I’m not”, said I, “I’ve given you the name of my doctor (Jeff Weinberger, and if you aren’t using him as your GP you’re missing out on a great one), the drug in question, and the dosage. How would I know all that if I were the wrong patient?” I received the same short shrift from the clerk/pharmacist that the gentleman ahead of me received when his Walgreen discount card was declared inoperative: “You have a problem, call the customer service line. Next!” I don’t blame the clerk’s rude refusal to acknowledge his company’s mistake, and his refusal to even attempt to resolve the problem, on him as much as I do his employer, who understaffs the store and creates the pressure that incubates such behavior (but I have always wondered why, if someone can’t stand people, he or she accepts a customer service job; tax attorneys are notorious for their lack of people skills and we always kept them chained in the back, doing their magic while never letting them meet clients). What’s the solution? None; the days of friendly pharmacists who know who you are long past, but when I return from vacation I’ll have Dr. Weinberger call in a new prescription to CVS and go there. And Walgreen’s will never know why it lost a customer.

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