Luxury Or Necessity? Americans Cut Back
From the kitchen to the laundry room to the home entertainment center, Americans are paring down the list of familiar household appliances they say they can't live without, according to a new national survey by the Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends project.
No longer do substantial majorities of the public say a microwave oven, a television set or even home air conditioning is a necessity. Instead, nearly half or more now see each of these items as a luxury, the report found. Similarly, the proportion that considers a dishwasher or a clothes dryer to be essential has dropped sharply since 2006.
The study also found these recession-era reevaluations are all the more striking because the public's luxury-versus-necessity perceptual boundaries had been moving in the other direction for the previous decade.
For example, the share of adults who consider a microwave a necessity was just 32% in 1996. By 2006, it had shot up to 68%. But it has now retreated to 47%. Similarly, just 52% of the public in the latest poll say a television set is a necessity -- down 12 percentage points from 2006 and the smallest share to call a TV a necessity since this question was first asked more than 35 years ago.
Read the full report.
(Pew Research Center)
The study also found these recession-era reevaluations are all the more striking because the public's luxury-versus-necessity perceptual boundaries had been moving in the other direction for the previous decade.
For example, the share of adults who consider a microwave a necessity was just 32% in 1996. By 2006, it had shot up to 68%. But it has now retreated to 47%. Similarly, just 52% of the public in the latest poll say a television set is a necessity -- down 12 percentage points from 2006 and the smallest share to call a TV a necessity since this question was first asked more than 35 years ago.
Read the full report.
The secrets of tennis legend 
Congeess
bush
the people that are greedy
the wars
the break up of the family
gandgs
disrespect
allowing the price of the basis to sky rocket
Who is the blame
I don't know
Even in America
What happened
Now we have to
make do with less
Or learn to take care to what we have
It is no longer to keep up with the Jones
It means wearing hand me downs
Or using an older computer
It means going back to basics
Some things are sp needs things
Greed must end.
no more me, myself and I
late grand parents taught values and manners
I came from a poor background
Very poorly schooled
But know how evil money and greed are
no I don't attend church,.
I don't need to
Yes it is hard times
Everything gets more costly.
Housing is higher
There more homeless today
We are told we live in
The greatest nation
Yet people are hurting
in ways we never thought would
Verse by Barbara
Some things are a need.
Wash dishes by hand. Don't need a machine to do the dishes, Use washer/dryer for full loads. .
Home computer a need.
the full report has a lot to chew on
so will take a little time to, shall we say, digest
ty CBS for this head's up from Pew, and the link
Posted by mwhc1 at 11:02 AM : Apr 24, 2009
Methinks you are reading too much into this.
cbsnews isn't spinning this one way or the other.
They are simply providing the results of a survey. One of the results was that less Americans today consider a washer/dryer a necessity than they did 3 years ago.
The time period over which this was measured was just 3 years. Don't make this into a sociological statement about American society or the next generation of Americans.