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The Postrecession Consumer

The recession has changed a lot of things for good.  And when we say good, we mean bad. Everybody has less money and everybody is spending less money. But they’re spending less in different ways, according to a survey by this marketing research firm called Decitica

. It predicts that the recession will reshape the consumer population into four distinct categories: steadfast frugalists, involuntary penny-pinchers, pragmatic spenders and apathetic materialists. The pragmatic spenders are the older, wealthier people who used to really spread it around but have cut back because they’re not as sanguine about their financial future these days and, besides, they’ve discovered the joys of the simple life (sure they have). Three-quarters of these folks say they’re highly confident they can “resist the temptation to spend now and worry later” (which for us is a typical Friday night). The steadfast frugalists are the people who were always cheap and are still cheap because they get a kick out of saving money. Involuntary penny-pinchers is the category we’ve been shoved into and apathetic materialists is the group we aspire to join someday (as soon as we can match more than one number in the stupid lottery).

Should you give a Twit? Small businesses are reminded ad nauseam that they’d better get on Twitter or get shoved out of the nest. True? Not really. Investigation by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows only 8 percent of the American adults who use the internet use Twitter. The service is most popular among young people, blacks and Latinos, and city dwellers. But fully half of Twitter “users” check the site infrequently or not at all.

Tell investors to take a hike. That’s the message (sort of) suggested by Partha Mohanram, a professor of financial accounting at the University of Toronto. Mohanram has done research indicating that growth fueled by profit has lasting value for a company, while growth fueled by investment is actually detrimental in the long run.