Survey Gauges Consumers’ Economic Concerns

New York City, The International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) and UBS Securities announced on Wednesday the results of their recent consumer survey, conducted by Opinion Research Corp., to assess how worried U.S. consumers are about widely publicized economic hardships such as 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.

Key findings included:

Of those consumers who said they were aware of the issues, nearly half (46%) said they had not changed their spending habits and were optimistic that the markets would settle down soon;

Thirteen 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% of respondents said that they are aware of the market activity and will “think twice before making major or non-essential purchases;”

Twenty-five percent of respondents said they were not following the situation; and

The remainder of the respondents did not know how the situation might affect them.