By Adam Lass
Middle-class folks aren't the only ones cutting back. The wealthy class, or top 10 percenters who contribute 70% to our GDP, are spending less. Last I checked, my friend Joe hated chicken wings.

Joe grew up poor in America’s rural south. Not dirt-poor or anything like that. More like working poor. In fact, just about everyone in his family worked at least one job, if not two.

His mom used to buy wings by the 100-pack from the local market, and serve them up deep-fried with hot sauce and homemade cabbage and carrot coleslaw to a horde of siblings, friends and any miscellaneous neighborhood kids who were hanging around.

At the time, he thought it was the bee’s knees, but when you eat anything night after night after night, eventually, you can go sour on it. By the time he was a full-fledged adult, able to choose what he did and did not have for dinner, Joe swore that chicken wings would never grace his table again.

I checked in with Joe recently after not hearing from him for some time. I was going to be in his neck of the woods for a meeting, and suggested we get together and catch up a bit. When I asked where we might meet, he suggested (much to my surprise) a place called “Buffalo Wild Wings.”

On my way to the restaurant, I passed several other well-known chain “eateries.” I’m sure you’ve regretted eating and drinking in most of them at one time or another. Hey, that’s why they invented Tums, right?

Despite this being a warm Friday evening in a solid middle-class suburban neighborhood just outside a supposedly well-to-do American city, most of the lots were only half full, and two buildings were boarded up entirely.

But the cheap wings joint was parked up tight, with whole families congregating in the heat out front waiting for tables.

Fortunately, Joe already had a table staked out for us, replete with two cold mugs of beer and an enormous bowl of hot wings. After we got the usual hello-how-are-yas and backslapping out of the way, I figured I just had to ask: “Joe, are doing okay? I thought you swore off wings forever.”

“Oh I eat here all the time now. Things are fine. Well, fine as they can be, considering. Some of the other outfits in town are going out of business, and even a few of my clients had to bail on projects.

“Oh and one *$&%*$^@# stiffed me for the final payment. We’re in small claims court over that, but he’s gone belly up, and I doubt I’ll see a nickel anytime soon.

“I’ve laid a couple of guys off, but they were slackers anyway. Used to show up hung over when they showed up at all. You know -- Monday morning flu and what not.

“But seriously, it’s the costs that get to ya: gas for the trucks, materials for the jobs, electric, groceries and what not. Sometimes it’s enough to make ya cross-eyed.”

Now don’t let the way Joe talks fool you. He shows up at six in the morning on every job he takes, and runs his crews like a martinet. But it’s been a long time since he got his own hands but so dirty, and I believe he brings in six figures pretty reliably, and seven in a good year.

And I’ve never met a man with a better head for figures. Had Joe the luxury of attending a prestigious college like Yale or Harvard, he might just be one of those professorial types warning us all about just how bad things have gotten -- and how much worse they are likely to get.

Instead, as Joe likes to put it, he’s a guy who “has enough sense to get off the tracks when there’s a freight train headed his way.” So Joe already knew what the Institute for Supply Management just announced: that rising prices are shrinking the once mighty U.S. service sector.

Joe could have told you a month ago what Goldman Sachs’ Adrianne Shapira just got around to mentioning: “We expected that as the checks fade, so would (chain store) sales. Consumers are filling their SUVs, their home equity values are plummeting, and they are feeling a lot of pressures.”

Joe may not know for a personal fact that national gains in worker productivity are slowly grinding to halt. It takes some bright guys at the Department of Labor to figure out that the amount a U.S. employee produces for every hour on the job grew 0.55% in the second quarter of 2008.

But he can tell you that he -- like so many other bosses -- will pay fewer workers less cash in 2008. And even with this “leaner, meaner” workforce, he will still come up short profit-wise.  Continued...