Besides cosmetics, what still makes money in a depressed economy?

Gasoline companies.

Inferior Goods

Guns and ammo. Gold. Dollar stores.

Casinos, grocery stores, and second hand stores

Small appliance repair shops.

Movies. People crave entertainment.

Bullets… or as @Judi puts it… “ammo”.

My local auto mechanic has us lined up around the block for service.

The computer gurus are now charging $75/hr for house calls and are booked up weeks in advance.

The funeral homes have a steady business.

Fossil fuels, minerals, processed foods, fast food, mechanics, alcohol and liquor, cable companies, seasonal store fronts, recycling companies, that is about it….
Second hand stores do better but not very many do well to begin with. The largest of our world economies issues could be solved by relief from big bank loans and interest and lowering the tax on fuels or shifting the tax and using the dollars to restore business thus creating jobs….Just my two cents.

Just about anything relating to pets. The pet industry is huge and goes on pretty much regardless of the economy. Unless you are the sort who dumps the pet at the spca when you tire of it, most folks will forgo their own pampering to make sure the dog gets his!

@rooeytoo Better to dump the unwanted pet at an animal shelter than to dump it in a ditch in the country. At least at the animal shelter it has a chance of finding a new home.

90%+ of the pets dumped in the ditch in the country end up shot by the local landowners, or eaten by predators, and they are usually the lucky ones.

Gold and silver, both the metal itself and stocks in the companies which mine them,

@WestRiverrat – I think you should not get a pet in the first place if you are the dumping type. Dumping is not good no matter where you do it.

But yes I do agree with you, at least the spca will kill it humanely (hopefully) if it is not adopted by someone else.

Drugs and Prostitution.

Oh… Porn… duhhhh

Another vote for porn.

Catering to people’s vices is almost always profitable .. right up until you get caught, or someone stronger wants your place.

fast food. forever 21

McDonald’s

Karaoke Bars

Hairdressing (so a hairdresser told me). When we feel bad because we lost our job/break up with a partner, we get our hair done. When we feel good/to to parties, we get our hair done.

Pornography. A lot of people don’t realize just how large the porn industry is (it’s considered to be the second-largest income generator on the Internet after gambling), and that it goes far beyond just posing for dirty pictures. There’s a vast support network necessary to create porn, from editing erotica to writing porn video scripts, from running under-the-desk cams for foot fetishists to gobbling gummy bears on camera for vore fetishists. You can draw custom fetish art or sell your dirty, skidmarked underwear. You can be part of an anarchist porn collective which shares only with each other or run your own small mom-and-pop operation. And the best thing is, there’s no such thing as market saturation. People ALWAYS want more porn than exists. The entire world’s productivity could be pumped (hard and fast) into the porn industry and it still wouldn’t satisfy demand.

@SmashTheState

Allll rightie then! WAY more information than I wanted or needed! Heh!

Drugs, weapons, prostitution. The free market classics.

Everything still makes money. The income streams shift; the product, service and option choices change; customers get much more discriminating about selecting value, and producers have to re-examine their processes and sources to cut costs wherever they can, but “industries” don’t collapse in depressed economies, only poorly run businesses do.

alcohol and tobacco. Oh yeah, plumbers (people always gotta go, toilets gotta clog).

Prostitution. That seems to be resistant to economic problems.

The entertainment industry and telemarketers.

Craft beer.

http://beeradvocate.com/forum/read/4319684