Entrepreneurial types: What types of businesses or industries.....

[OneGrassRoot]

do you foresee being the ones who will be doing best in the next few years? The ones which others will be creating products and services for?

Also, while bartering and more collective ways of living will, hopefully, increase, what types of consumer products and services do you think may do well in the next few years?

We've always heard that in economic downturns the alcoholic beverage business and hair salons/barbers still thrive (porn probably does, too...lol).

Thoughts?

On Edit: LEGAL options, please. ;-)

[HereSince1628]

1. Businesses associated with addictions always do well in bad times.

I suggest you consider recreational pharmacueticals.

[JDPriestly]

3. One of Roosevelt's earliest acts was to end Prohibition.

I know a lot of DUers will attack me for saying this, but we have paid a heavy price in terms of violent conduct, deaths on the highways and broken lives ever since. Yes, I know people drank during the Prohibition, but not nearly as much. It was not as easy to drink non-stop as it is now.

Having worked (without wanting or intending to) with a lot of alcoholics in the course of my life, I can tell you that alcohol is a horrible scourge on people's lives. Now, all of you who are in denial, start your attack. The more you justify alcoholism, the more likely it is that you will find out on your own person or in your own family just how bad alcohol really is.

And no I do not favor a return to the Prohibition. I just encourage more people to choose not to drink. A sober life is a sane life, a happier life.

[HereSince1628]

6. Not just the during the Great Depression but in all the recessions since then

Philip Morris and the other big tobacco companies have done well during recessions.
The breweries and distilleries have done well in recessions. Partly because of addiction and partly because of self-medicating.

Addictions making demands on consumption and spending. Demand for Nicotine, Caffiene, and Alcohol have been good bets in recession.

[JDPriestly]

7. You call it self-medicating. I call it slow suicide. And tobacco and

alcohol are not the only ways to slowly kill yourself.

[HereSince1628]

9. I don'c call it self-medicating. Physicians in the field of addiction

use that term.

And yes, of course, there are lots of substances to abuse.

[Oregone]

2. Meth production

[Warpy]

4. You couldn't go wrong in the Depression

if you owned a cheap diner or a gin mill.

However, we didn't just elect another Hoover, hamstrung by GOP economic dogma. We have a chance of avoiding Depression and getting out of this one with a deep recession if he does what he needs to do and what he said he would do in his campaign speeches.

Right now, he's probably been informed that the people who own this country won't allow him to do these things, so don't expect any quick action in that department.

This is likely to get very ugly before he's allowed to do what needs to be done. The wealthy have to hurt, first.

[99th_Monkey]

5. 2nd hand stores, strip joints & liquor stores. ~nt

[Joe Fields]

8. loan sharking

Oh, I'm sorry. The mortgage lenders beat me to it.