By Robert Dean
Guest Columnist
I keep thinking about Batsakes Hat Shop.
Batsakes will lock its doors in September, ending nearly 120 years downtown and the working life of Gus Miller, one of the last traditional hatmakers in the country. Miller’s uncles Pete and George founded it in 1907; he arrived from a Greek village at 17 in 1951 and swept floors and shined shoes before learning to block felt by hand. He’s 93 — he says 94 — still gets up at four, doesn’t drive, and his wife Rita brings him in every morning.
Guys don’t wear a hat like they used to, and that’s like many things in this world: we don’t call repairmen to fix the television; we throw it out. And the people capable of fixing something are getting fewer and further between, because companies don’t want someone from the outside to learn what’s inside, just like our cars.
I don’t have to explain this to you, but the economy is not good. Last week, the Labor Department reported that employment unexpectedly shrank by 23,000 positions last month — compared with the 83,000 gain that economists had forecast. They also revised reports from May and June down by a combined 103,000 jobs.
The Labor Department also reported that hourly earnings for nonsupervisory and production workers fell by a tenth of a percent over the last year when adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted weekly earnings had moved up in the year ending in June, but those gains came with a similar increase in the average number of hours worked — a signal that plenty of folks are barely getting by.
Back in the Spring, the White House fought analysts on the presumption that the only real job gains were coming from one specific sector: AI data centers. Politicos want to say that the construction economy is booming – sure, because they’re building stuff no one wants.
We’ve been thrust into a world that is always trying to extract more blood from more stones, even when the rock patch ain’t got much left in terms of give.
Sooner rather than later, Gus Miller will turn the key at Batsakes for the last time. The display cases will go. The hats will go. Someone will take the sign to hang in their new tacky faux “culture” observant bar. And Cincinnati will still have plenty of places to buy something to put on your head. That isn’t the point. What disappears is a place where a man could spend his entire adult life learning how to make one thing well and where doing that could sustain a business for more than a century.
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