CES Blog: We Have Entered The Spin Zone

We found out this morning that the economy lost 524,000 jobs in the month of December. Simple logic would tell you those people were potential buyers of new televisions, cameras and other consumer electronics products. Now they are less likely to be buyers because –- well –- they don't have a job.

You wouldn't know that from many of the on-camera interviews we have done here at the Consumer Electronics Show, where attendance is down by 8% from last year (presumably because of the slowing economy). Despite that, executive after executive has shown up at our location to tell us that demand for their product is holding up pretty well. It must be the other guy.

Yet, when the conversation is not on-camera (off the record or on "background" is the term we journalists use), the outlook is not always so positive. Executives, lower level employees and industry analysts all concede that the environment is a very difficult one to operate in.

How do we know it's so difficult? Nobody seems to know how much to charge for things. I've been asking the question, "How much does this cost?" And the answer has, more often than not, been "we're not sure yet." The reason they're not sure is they have no idea what the pricing environment is going to be like when these products hit the market in six months.

So are things really holding up relatively well? They are -- here in the spin zone, anyway.

-Connell