Bad Economy?

With all the news of our economy being in bad shape most of us have had our minds on our money and how to spend it wisely.
I recently needed to shop around for a water heater for our house and since it's a special sealed combustion type it was going to cost a lot of money.
so as a good little consumer I started checking out the prices of water heaters and prices for installation for the unit on line.
Once I had a fairly good ideal how much money was involved I began to look for a plumber to do the installation.
It turned out to be much harder than i had thought!
You would think with people loosing their jobs and money being tight that customer service would be the one thing that most businesses would try to do better at than any other thing they could do.
Unfortunately I found out this was not the case.
I called about 25 plumbers and even put my job on a web site that connects local people with services and the response I go back?
I got a total of 5 plumbers that responded! FIVE out of all those calls and internet inquires!
Most of the plumbers were a little less than enthusiastic about doing the job.
I was frankly dumbfounded that I could not get anyone to do the job!
I did eventually find someone to do the job and they turned out to be a great plumber but this experience has tainted me for sometime to come.
It seems fairly obvious to me that a lot of these people didn't want to work and i can only hope that the millions of Americans that are out of work will step in to the jobs that some people don't want.
Paul