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This is John Batchel, speaking to my colleague Jim McTag, former Barron's Washington editor now in Lancaster County as a novelist. However, the old habits prowling around looking for signs

of slowdown or speed up or avoid the recession or not, Jim finds restaurants and diners

very useful metric.

Anecdotal.

Last two weeks.

Here's Jim.

Much more of this tonight.

Well, I didn't go to Dockside Willys.

I went to the Linden Diner in East Petersburg, Pennsylvania, which is a famous

diner because that's where all the politicians stopped during campaign season, because

generally it's so crowded. A waitress there who has been there five years told me that for the

past two weeks, the customers have virtually disappeared.

Hardly anybody is showing up.

She said she's talked to chefs and waitresses at other diners, and she's hearing the same story.

And this is maybe a coincidence, but a very popular restaurant, the Iron Hill Brewery, part of a 16 restaurant chain. The Iron

Hill, which had a restaurant across from the campus of Franklin and Marshall College, declared

bankruptcy and closed up all 16 locations suddenly. This tells me that the conventional wisdom

that we're going to skirt a recession is totally wrong

because I think restaurants are the canary in the coal mine.

Hi, Alastair Campbell from The Restis Politics.

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