In Recession, Television Beats Clothes, Food and Cars

In a recession, people make cuts. But what would you give up first, your pants or your light bulbs? Your car or your cellphone? Those are important questions and an Ipsos/Reuters poll has the answer. We will eat dogfood before canceling HBO, Gawker concludes.

Personally, I'd say that after The Wire ended, that tradeoff has become somewhat redundant. Ahem. More importantly, check out this cool graph:
The Reuters poll, which included people in the US, Turkey, Japan and 20 other major countries, found consumer demand stabilizing, although this graph would still indicate that tourism could be the last thing to catch up. I'm mostly pleased that more than 50% of respondents said they were cutting back on energy use and driving, which is apparently even easier to do that cutting back on shopping for food. Cutting back on text messages? That's a sacrifice. Saving the planet, not so much. Now that is progress.