When times are bad, jobs vanish, sales plummet, investment declines, and tax revenues fall precipitously — in New York, for instance, state revenues in April and May were down thirty-six per cent from a year earlier.
But this year the Grammys were held earlier than ever, to avoid competition with the Olympics, and the holiday boost nearly vanished: overall sales were up only 3 percent for the week.
It is unclear what constitutes commercial success in a world of vanishing CD sales.
But in the face of folding orchestras, diminishing finances, vanishing record sales and retracting audiences, there exist stubborn and imaginative pockets of resistance determined, for example, to put string instruments into the hands and ears of children.
Buyers vanished; new-home sales have dropped nearly 25percentt since April.
In the last few months, hardware makers like Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Dell have suffered as one-fifth to one-quarter of their computer sales vanished.
Fast forward to 2012, and sales of netbooks have nearly vanished, replaced by surging sales of the iPad and other tablets.
On March 15, for example, 26 calves vanished from a sale barn in the Houston County town of Crockett — the same night that a livestock trailer was stolen in neighboring Walker County.
By 1993, cigarettes, which were subject to excise taxes, had become so expensive in Serbia that legal sales effectively vanished.
