New York — The International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) and UBS Securities recently commissioned a consumer survey by Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) to assess how worried U.S. consumers are about recent, widely publicized economic events like housing market weakness, stock market tumult and drastic fluctuations in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The survey questioned a sample of 1,000 American consumers about how the financial problems would affect their financial habits
The survey’s key findings follow:
- of those consumers who said they were aware of the issues, nearly half (46 percent) said they had not changed their spending habits and were optimistic that the markets would settle down soon;
- 13 percent of respondents who said they were aware of the situation also said that they do not rely on the stock market to predict their personal spending habits.
- another 13 percent of respondents said that they are aware of the market activity and will “think twice before making major or non-essential purchases,” said a release;
- 25 percent of respondents said they were not following the situation; and
- according to a release, the remainder of the respondents did not know how the situation might affect them.
