How consumers rewrote the old recessionary rules

Buying less of the same stuff

    Another surprising phenomenon, says Linda Bolton Weiser, an analyst at Caris & Co., was that many consumers simply cut back on the frequency of their purchases. "With hair care, you saw sales growth doing better than volume growth," she says. "The lowest price point shampoos, like Suave and VO5, did worse than everything else."

    The steakhouse chain Outback saw same-store sales drop by 10.7% during the third quarter of 2009. McDonald's' (MCD, Fortune 500) same store sales went up. But that doesn't mean Outback loyalists were giving up their steaks for Big Macs -- they're not mindless drones, shuffling between restaurants as their income rises or drops.

    What's more likely, says Bennett, is that customers were making complex behavioral decisions, whether that means going to Outback once a month or grilling steaks at home. We've shifted from doing budgetary algebra to calculus, she says, and the trend towards rationalism is likely to stick -- at least until the next recession proves it wrong.