Well, yes, of course. As Fantasminha said, the Big Three's sales over the past 15 years or so have been fueled by timely and shrewd marketing of an impractical product to a public that was going through a period of highly irrational beliefs about what it "needed". One ad in particular exemplified this trend to me: the one where the punchline was, "It's not more than you need. It's just more than you're used to." It was the Big Lie in action: a complete reversal of the truth so audacious that it was paradoxically believable.

Now, as you note, things are different. Reality has finally set in hard. If you read back in these forums, you'll see that a lot of people here twigged to it years ago: there are many past discussions in which people have pointed out the unsustainability of American consumption. Although my impression is that most of us do not commute primarily to "be green" or to save money, I think that many people here do seem to have an atypical tendency to...how to put it...do things the hard way? That's not quite right, maybe I mean more "not take the easy way out", or "not assume that the easy way will always be there". So, I guess at least some of us were early adopters of the changes that are hitting a lot of the population now. Just a couple of years ago, driving a ten-year-old car marked you as eccentric or poor; now, hey -- if it'll still run and it's not a constant repair bill, hooray for you and you're a fool if you get rid of it. People no longer assume that the raise will be there, that the job will be there, and they are trying not to make big-ticket purchases until they have to. They'll still make them, but they'll defer them longer and buy value when they do buy. "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" -- anyone hear that from a parent or grandparent? I predict a comeback.