>By Hugh R. Morley, The Record, Hackensack, N.J.
Jun. 8–Rick Breitstein has a small businessman’s eye for the economy and figures it curdled about a month ago.
That’s about the time his store, the Cheese Shop of Ridgewood, a purveyor of up-market dairy products to the village’s affluent, suffered a double-digit drop in business, he said.
Part of the problem, he said, is the economic woes of Ridgewood’s sizable pool of financial-services workers.
“I have customers that don’t come here anymore,” said Breitstein, surrounded by slabs of English Stilton and French Epoisse and Brillat-Savarin cheeses that sell for as much as $60 a pound.
“They are bond traders,” he said. “They are all suffering — They are not making the money.”
Breitstein is one of several Ridgewood storeowners who say they have felt the impact of the plummeting fortunes of the state’s financial industry on their own bottom line.
Experts say the industry’s loss of 4 percent of its workforce in the last 30 months is just the start as Wall Street firms carry out thousands of layoffs announced in recent months.
Financial job cuts in New York also hurt North Jersey because of the high volume of commuters. That’s especially true in Ridgewood, where the 2000 Census found one in six of the village’s employed residents worked in the financial-services sector.
Other North Jersey communities with sizable numbers of financial-services employees included Wyckoff, Wayne, Paterson, Clifton, Fort Lee and Edgewater, the Census reported.
The impact on Ridgewood offers a snapshot of the variety of ways that these communities are affected by the industry’s hard times.
A few blocks from Breitstein’s store, bagel maker Elliot Cohen said he has been seeing far fewer customers from the Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney offices on Ridgewood Avenue than in the past.
“We used to get breakfast and lunch deliveries there, and we’ve seen a lot less,” he said. “One guy used to buy breakfast for the whole group on Friday. He doesn’t come anymore.”
At Re/Max Properties of Ridgewood, Sal Poliandro said the changing fortunes of the financial sector are evident among his clientele. He sold a house for a man employed at UBS’s Weehawken office after that office downsized and he was moved to Charlotte, N.C. The company said in March it would lay off 14 employees at the office.
Another UBS employee, who recently moved from Virginia to work in the same UBS office, bought a $900,000 house with Poliandro’s help but is getting jittery about her job security, he said.
“I spoke to her and she is a little concerned,” he said. “But she is still working.”
Gary Sparker, a system designer at Sound View Electronics, which sells high-end video and sound equipment, said concern about the future among financial brokers is one reason the store’s business has been slow for about six months.
“I’ve had a few people say, ‘Let’s see what my bonus is like this year, and I’ll be back,’ ” he said. “People are more cautious with the decision-making.”
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Copyright (c) 2008, The Record, Hackensack, N.J.