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In addition to regular salaries, many American families also fatten their pocketbooks with second and even third incomes—and most of those are used as discretionary income. One-third of U.S. married women hold jobs, and many wage earners moonlight in order to build on an extra room or buy a new freezer. The consumer can make the economy rise by trading up from hamburger to steak, buying an air conditioner to replace the window fan or taking that long-planned trip to Europe. By the same token, he has the power to slow or reverse the economic advance by deciding to postpone his purchases. "The consumer is the key to our economy," says Macy's Jack Straus. "When the country has a recession, it suffers not so much from problems of production as from problems of consumption."
The consumer spends his extra income only when he is in a good mood—and his good mood in 1964 was one of the year's happiest events for the U.S. The consumer has been spending 93¢ of every dollar that he earns, and is unafraid about borrowing to spend even more. One reason for his continued buoyancy: he has lost almost all fear that a serious downturn will occur. In a nation in which half of the population is under 26, more spending than ever is being done by people who have grown up knowing only the good times of the long postwar upswing. They are unscarred by the 1929 depression and little inclined to worry about another one. In the latest University of Michigan survey of consumers, a remarkable 46% forecast that the U.S. would never again have a recession of even the mild 1960 variety. Says Economist George Katona, the chief pollster: "When we ask why not, we are most often told that 'they' have learned how to avoid a recession."
Big for Color. In its record-shattering sales of 8,000,000 cars in 1964, Detroit found that the average motorist, who had long been in the habit of buying a new car every four years, now buys one every three years—often the family's second or third car. Last year 5,000,000 Americans bought miniature or portable TV sets, mostly to supplement the big sets that they already had. It was also a big breakthrough year for the color TV industry, which added $500 million to the gross national product by marketing 1,400,000 sets, almost twice as many as the year before. Consumers responded with abandon to labor-saving devices: they bought 2,000,000 frostless refrigerators, 1,600,000 electric carving knives, hundreds of thousands of electric shoe polishers and self-cleaning ovens.
People stepped up their spending for better living (furniture sales were up 11%), for leisure (sporting goods up 5%) and culture (books up 8%). Close under the retailer's eye, dear to his heart and vital to his wallet was the fact that 75% of all department-store purchases were made by women. Indulging whimsy and impulse, they bought tens of millions of pairs of lacy, textured stockings (see MODERN LIVING) to wear in millions of fashionable high boots. They bought family pool tables, maternity stretch pants, gold-plated bathroom fixtures and electric sheet and mattress covers (for those who already have electric blankets).