There's change afoot in consumer buying behavior that's a result of our current economic malaise. I wonder if they're ever going to return to their old ways.
Discounter retail sales are up, while department stores are down. Store-branded products in grocery stores outpace sales of branded products at a rate of 3 to 1. Everywhere you look, or buy, people are trading down, buying less, and paying less for it. Even the value proposition for near-luxury items isn't so near and dear to people's pocketbooks.
Frugal isn't just a necessity for some anymore, but a conscious choice and badge of honor for many. And it could be the first step toward creating a repeat, unconscious behavioral pattern that could last for generations.
Sound a bit dire? There's a historical precedent in the Great Depression.
A generation grown comfortable with an addiction to flappers and costume parties found themselves with worthless stocks and a consuming public too scared to buy. Panic ensued, in the gloriously circular feedback loop that is a free market, and quickly taught people to patch their own shoes and drive West in search of employment.
The generation old enough to remember the experience were humbled for the rest of their lives. They never got over the habits of making more out of less. Anybody over 40 has a parent or grandparent who saved sheets of tin foil or Christmas wrapping paper. Even their kids (present company included) learned much of those same behaviors.
It took a few decades, and the concerted efforts of the greatest minds of the Golden Era of Advertising, to change the game enough so that subsequent generations could more readily embrace the joys of wanton consumerism. Their expert handiwork helped cushion the effects of the more recent shocks, like in the 70s and then again around the burst bubble of the Internet at the start of this Century.
What's different now -- and more, perhaps, the same as the era of the Great Depression -- is not so much that we're in a period of economic calamity. Things are bad, and they may stay bad for a while, but we could also simply be experiencing a transition period:
- Large employers giving way to a multitude of lone wolves/independent agents
- Technology making entire new communication and distribution networks possible, and
- A restructuring of society based on the limitations of place and time imposed by renewable energy production
But there's the rub: even when our economies recover, the society that emerges won't likely be anywhere near as willing to spend as recklessly as the one we're watching die right now.
Crisis and/or transition, aren't the opinions and morals of our society changing?
A sustainable society wouldn't find brash consumerism so sexy, would it? Networked individuals need fewer badges of status when they don't see one another in the flesh ever, and don't require status to order their interactions anyway. If incomes are not growing as fast as they did in an economy that spit pollution and other muck into the externality of the atmosphere, will kids put themselves into hock just to buy the latest compost heaps?
I just don't think Gaia would wear bling. And if I'm not a dim bulb on this one, that spells major trouble for the brands that would hope otherwise.
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