One year on, economy begins to thaw

Think about what was happening on this date last year.

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We were in the most intense part of the presidential campaign. The economy had begun to wobble. A few days earlier, the government bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Tomorrow, Lehman Brothers will file for bankruptcy. The next day, the stock market will plummet, and a couple of days later the Federal Reserve bails out AIG.

It all seems like a long time ago now. We are so used to living with economic issues at the forefront of our consciousness now that it’s hard to believe that, while we could all see that the economy was in rough shape, we really didn’t know how bad it was going to get.

I started writing this column at about the same time. At first I had written columns about how to get things you wanted more cheaply. General shopping strategies and ways to get the most out of disposable income were my stock and trade. Over the ensuing weeks, however, I found myself gravitating to “pinching pennies” ideas. It made more sense to write about saving money on your utilities than it did to talk about how to get nice clothes on the cheap.

That’s because, in the past year we’ve all been concerned about every dollar we spend. It has been interesting, then, to see the ice beginning to thaw in the past month or so.

Working at DealTaker.com, you are around shopping all day. You get an feel for what people are looking for, what they are willing to spend money on and how hesitant they are to make purchases that they wouldn’t have thought twice about previously. For a while, it seemed like people would buy only necessities like clothes, items for their home or the occasional gift. Now you can see that people are starting to spend more on things like travel, electronics and toys. There is a general feeling that, while times are still tough, the arrow is pointing up.

With Black Friday and the holiday shopping season right around the corner, it wouldn’t surprise me if we find ourselves in the middle of a mini-boom. Many retail stores, hoping to see some positive returns during this holiday season for the first time in a while, could begin priming the pump with deals that they wouldn’t have considered offering last year. Couple this with the fact consumers might be willing to open their wallets a bit wider than they have all year.

All of this to say that the rest of this year could potentially be very exciting from a shopping perspective. I’m not trying to fool myself into believing that everything suddenly will be back to normal. If anything, the lessons learned in the past year should teach us that normal may not be the best approach. As the holiday season approaches, however, we might be able to look back and say that a year did indeed make a substantial difference.