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« Sketches Of DCA's Future | Main | More On The DCA Preview Center » October 11, 2008"The New Age Of Frugality"BusinessWeek's cover story this week is called "The New Age Of Frugality", and it's all about the changing habits of American consumers (podcast here): Ingram and Behre are harbingers of a dawning Age of Frugality. People who overconsumed during the past decade are now rejecting extravagant lifestyles. They're spending less, and more wisely. Some are getting their finances in order. Others are fearful of losing their jobs, shocked by investment losses, or hunkering down amid the general uncertainty. I have to say, this describes everyone I'm talking to right now. Elaine and I have been making some changes in our lifestyles (that Disneyland trip will likely be our last for some time), and I've been interested to hear how many of my peeps are doing the same. Rather than dinners out, friends are suggesting dinners in (or potlucks); people are riding the bus, skipping the morning Starbucks, and so on. Suddenly, frugality is cool. My friend Brian and I got in to a long discussion about what these changes, if they broaden and stick, will do to the larger economy. Our consensus was that mass-market, low-cost necessities providers like Wal-Mart and Costco are going to be fine, as are firms like Apple that make good-quality, differentiated products. However, a lot of other firms - American car companies, for example - are in for a rough freakin' ride. The next few years are going to be really, really strange, I think. What are y'all doing? Posted by Gavin Shearer at October 11, 2008 4:27 PM. Posted to Cool. Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsWell, to some extent, since I've been a college student and/or married to a college student for the last five years, it's not really a "new" frugality... :) Both cars are paid off and we're not agitating to replace them anytime soon. We live within walking distance of school/work. For the most part, the farthest place to which we drive on a regular basis is six miles away; if it's the grocery store, more like a mile, depending on where we're going. We cook a lot rather than eat out. We like to do that anyway. We enjoy entertaining people at home over something we made ourselves and a bottle of wine; we're usually able to do a lot better for the money. When people ask me what my favorite restaurant in Bloomington is, I say, "My house!" Since we don't watch TV anyway, we cancelled cable and switched to DSL. That saved us about $100 a month right there. We just bought Megan an iPod (one of the new 120gb Classics); she's busy right now dumping most of her CDs onto it and selling the actual discs on Amazon. It's going quickly enough that the iPod will have paid for itself pretty soon, and she'll be able to take her entire music collection with her wherever she goes without needing to cart around boxes of CDs. It'll make moving less of a hassle, too. (Being more of the collector type, I have the iPod AND I'm keeping the CDs. I will say this -- make all of the booklets for all of the discs I have available as PDFs, and I'll happily get rid of them.) We buy local as much as we can. It is cheaper in the long run if not the short run, for a host of reasons. Bloomington's bus service sucks Dick Cheney's farts through a straw, so alas, that's an area which is rather out of our control. Ironically, Bloomington Transit has a "Dump the Pump" advertising campaign going on right now at the same time they're announcing that service is going to have to be drastically cut because of fuel prices. Go figure. Crunchy Cons has certainly been an influence over the last couple of years. Not the final word, necessarily, but there are people who have been trying to build this kind of thing into their lives for a couple of years now. Richard Posted by: Richard Barrett Post a commentThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)« Sketches Of DCA's Future | Main | More On The DCA Preview Center » |
