golden age of spending for the American consumer has ended and a new age of thrift likely has begun , '' said a Wall Street analyst . `` Sixty percent off is the new black , '' quipped a magazine fashion writer . Gone , seemingly overnight , were the throngs of buyers from Europe and Asia who had been dragging their wheelies down Fifth Avenue in New York , loading up on shoes and handbags and leaving us American shoppers feeling , even then , like poor country cousins . Word spread that we were now living in `` the Wal-Mart moment , '' which was likely to be rather drawn out . Our longstanding fetish for bigger , faster , flashier , pricier was no more . . With the most hyped shopping day on the calendar -- Black Friday ! -- upon us , we all might take a deep breath and focus , not just on where to find the best door-busters , but on more important questions : What is going on out there ? In the buying and selling universe , are we witnessing a permanent change in values ? Have we all turned
New York -LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Three years ago I began research on a book dedicated to the national pastimes : shopping and buying . The plan was to devote the first half of the story to what I called the `` sell side '' : the retailers , marketers and consumer researchers who have their sights trained on us . The second half would be about us , the `` buy side . '' I would explore all that attracts us -- bees to nectar -- to specific stores and products , why some of us are cheapskates and others have holes in our pockets . Then , a not-so-funny thing happened . Between the time I started my reporting and the time I handed in my finished manuscript , both the sell and the buy sides had cratered . Home prices crashed . Credit markets collapsed . The government tried feverishly to glue broken banks back together . Unemployment went up and up and up . The result : consumer spending -- as in that which drives 70 percent of the U.S. economy -- was running on fumes . Department store sales sank by double-digits . `` The