container ship
One very tangible manifestation of weak consumer demand is what's happening with container ships.

World trade is down, so the number of ships needed to transfer stuff from country to country is necessarily less. And idle ships cost a lot of money.

What to do? Destroy them.

Paul Kedrosky picked up on the trend on his blog, InfectiousGreed:



This Alphaliner graph shows the record pace of containership demolition this year: