Give Me Shopping or Give Me Death!

Getty Images Peggy Noonan thinks we have entered a new era of austerity and "authenticity chic." Lee Eisenberg says she's not giving enough credit to the indomitable American consumer.

Last week, apparently bereft of an Isaiah Berlin parable to inform her weekly noodling in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan deferred to a muse considerably less august. She ruminated over a story that had a few days earlier appeared in USA Today about a Michigan family who’d chosen to give up their increasingly hard-to-afford creature comforts (credit cards, satellite TV, etc.) and seek refuge from the economic storm. These “21st-century homesteaders,” without so much as Dancing With the Stars to divert them, now raise chickens and pigs, harvest vegetables from their own garden, and keep a woodstove burning to fight off the financial and cultural deep-freeze. In Noonan’s view, the Wojtowicz family is indicative of the current and likely future fate of what was—only yesterday!—the land of plenty. “There will be fewer facelifts and browlifts,” Noonan wrote of this new authenticity chic, “less Botox, less dyed hair among both men and women. [People] will look more like people used to look, before perfection came in.”

Observe the 70/30 “golden ratio” rule when taking stock of one’s own closet: 70 percent of what’s in there should be basic evergreen stuff that never goes out of style while a maximum of 30 percent should be stuff that qualifies as oh-so trend-right.

In other words, an anticonsumerist’s dream come true.

Well, maybe that’ll happen, but I don’t think so. While Noonan was brushing up on towering English philosophers as she idly flipped through USA Today, I’ve been lurking on scores of female consumer blogs—nothing kinky, it has to do with a book I’m writing. And what I see is not a pandemic of—yuck—bland affluence so much as ringing affirmation—thump, thump—of the American spirit, much like the qualities Noonan used to extol when she was writing presidential speeches. I’m talking about good old-fashioned Can Do! About the irrepressible, unquenchable, indomitable, and quintessentially red-white-and-blue drive to overcome any challenge, any time, anywhere. In this case to shop, come hell or high water.

Not that we’re not feeling the pinch. Right now I’m looking at retail sales reports for March, which year-over-year were down in the single-digits, a figure that masks some truly catastrophic declines: Abercrombie & Fitch (-34 percent); Ann Taylor (-24.5 percent); Bebe (-23.5 percent); Dillards (-19 percent); Gap/Banana Republic (-16 percent); J. Crew (-13 percent); Liz Claiborne (-22 percent); Saks (-23.6 percent); Zales (-18.1percent). Scary.

The precious few retailers on the plus side got off lucky for all the wrong reasons: Blockbuster (people can’t afford to go out); CVS (it sells relief for headaches and upset stomachs); PetSmart (alas, Rex has to eat, too). But if you look beyond the generally awful numbers, put a glass to the wall and eavesdrop on online-customer yakking, what you'll hear isn’t all gloom and doom. What you’ll hear is that the committed American shopper has no intention of going gently into that good night of bland affluence, nor embracing the false dawn of authenticity chic. Instead, she—and she is a she, given that some 80 percent of consumer spending is driven by women—is regrouping, playing the angles, shifting tactics. Ingenious new shopping strategies abound:

* Cost-per-wear is the new black. The inveterate shopper is finding solace (and much self-justification) in the currently fashionable notion that while it’s hard to swallow an out-of-pocket hit of, say, $1,200 for a new dress at Barneys, it’s not so crazy if you tell yourself that the dress can and will be worn on a projected, say, 20 occasions over the next couple of years. This brings its effective CPW ($60) down to levels normally found at H&M.