Nervous Nelly Consumers Hampering Recovery?

Who can blame people now, the average Joes of the world who keep this great economy of ours running by buying things and keeping that American spirit of consumerism alive, for being a tad bit nervous about spending their hard earned cash when they think it might be taken from them again in either a job loss or a bad stock market crash where they have their money invested.

Not only that, but a lot of the consumers that keep this great economy going actually don’t have jobs right now or are biting their nails waiting for or partially expecting that pink slip that no one wants to see these days since it means going out and looking for a job in a market that’s really tight and extremely hard to bust through now.

Apparently this nervousness is going to cost the economic recovery and slow it down so that it may be delayed for quite some time. But how could we not have expected this when unemployment rates are nearly 15% in many areas, in some areas worse than that? It’s like asking people to forget the last year and a half, the pain of losing money through investments, losing jobs, getting paycuts and maybe even losing their homes because they could no longer afford their mortgages? People definitely don’t forget that easily, and that’s exactly why a lot of that commercial space that is empty will stay empty for at least another year most likely.

There just aren’t the consumers out there to buy the products to get the economy going again. People are either too nervous to buy goods and services or they are looking for a bottom of the barrel deal. Just yesterday I read an article headline that suggested that now that consumers are so used to paying low prices for things
that once the prices do go back up to “normal retail” we may experience a bit of consumer backlash where people downright refuse to pay those normal prices again. I think that’s called stagflation maybe? I’m no economist though!

There is actually a consumer sentiment index that sort of reads how consumers are feeling about the economy and their financial security, and it still isn’t all that great with most jittery about losing their jobs and becoming another one of the depressing stories we keep hearing about and reading about almost every day. Also, add onto that the fact that retail sales actually fell in July, and this created a bit of a selloff in the stock market last Friday due to the fact that most investors felt these readings could definitely stall the recovery.