A very reliable leading economic indicator

You'll know the recession is over when you actually hear the words your waitress is saying and stop thinking about what you would do to her.
That is the basic premise behind the new leading economic indicator, the Hot Waitress Index, developed by Hugo Lindgren. With the recession taking its toll on on the usual enclaves of aesthetically gifted females, many of them are trying to make ends meet by leveraging their looks with bars and restaurants desperate to stay in business.

So if you're sitting at a bar or club trying to imagine your waitress with more clothes on instead of off, the green shoots are blooming.


There are many ways to measure where we are in the economic cycle. GDP, unemployment numbers, housing starts, hot waitresses.

"The hotter the waitresses, the weaker the economy," Hugo Lindgren writes in New York Magazine. He has developed the Hot Waitress Index, under the theory that attractive people land great jobs in sales...when there are jobs in sales. When the economy contracts, they trade down to waiting tables.

Lindgren spoke to one waitress at a club on the Lower East Side, who told him, "They slowly let the boys go, then the less attractive girls, and then these hot girls appeared out of nowhere." But he also points out that hotness only goes so far. "Rare indeed is the waitress who is so smoking that customers don't mind when she drops a glass of Cabernet into their laps."

Lindgren claims the Hot Waitress Index is actually
a leading indicator, unlike the rest of unemployment. Hot people will migrate back to better jobs sooner than not-so-hot auto workers. So when you see the hot waitress go, it's time to feel good, not bad.The economy is rebounding.

Finally, Lindgren points out other indices apart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics which measure economic ups and down: The Overeducated Cabbie Index and, my favorite, The Speed at Which Contractors Return Calls Index- "within 24 hours, you're in a recession; if they call you without prompting, that's a depression."