Thursday, July 08, 2004

A Sign of the coming Apocalypse?

If they actually take to the ice in September, NHL stars had best be guarding their sticks closely. With the rumblings of a work stoppage becoming louder each day, officials at hockey stick manufacturer T. P. S. Hockey have issued lay off notices to production workers and office staff at their Wallaceburg, Ontario plant.

30 of the plants 135 employees are preparing to deal with no work and no prospect of it coming back. Plant officials say that when the plant ends its regular summer shutdown phase at the end of July, the unlucky 30 won’t be back.

With no orders arriving from NHL teams, the folks at TPS are expecting times to get tough. August is normally the plants busiest time of the year, as they gear up to provide thousands of pieces of their product to hopeful NHL training camp attendees. With this year up in the air so much, the company has decided not to bring in any raw materials to produce the stick. A situation that is certain to set in motion a domino effect, which will affect everyone from truck drivers to shipper/receivers.

There are approximately 120 NHL players that use the company’s one piece composite stick, with no hockey possibly on the horizon the normally expensive sticks will soon find themselves piling up on store shelves. For students of Economics the upcoming hostilities between the NHL and NHLPA may provide them with an easy to understand study of cause and effect economics.

Somewhere on some college campus, a young resourceful Economics student is putting the finishing touches on the specter of an economic collapse based upon the simple hockey stick.

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