One of my husband’s favorite sayings is “we’re all going to be eating rats”. He uses it whenever we go out to a shopping center or restaurant and there aren’t many people there.

Things do appear to be picking up. Is the economy that much better? Are people just tired of not spending? Is it that there are now fewer places to shop/ eat, so there’s a higher concentration of people in the places that are open?

I still don’t think people are back to spending “like the good old days” as this thread asks, but consumer behavior is changing.