Life's not like a box of chocolates

So that's it, then – no kids, no new house, no posh holiday...not even a box of chocolates. Let's all pack up and go home.
The picture Experian paints of the way consumers have reacted to recession is in parts alarming, in parts amusing.
Alarming, because it lays bare a level of consumer retrenchment that has left some businesses gasping for air.
Amusing, because some of that retrenchment appears to be a bit silly.
Away from the decision to save money by not having kids or buying a box of chocolates, the most interesting finding in Experian's Insight Report is the impact which information overload appears to have had on the way we all behave.
One of the reasons why significant numbers of people have become irrational and unpredictable in their consumer behaviour is that they are responding to a deluge of information which is difficult to decipher.
To many, it will seem as if the only certainty right now is uncertainty. So they play safe, sometimes deciding not to buy a bag of sweets, sometimes deciding not to go on holiday.
There is a lesson for the media and the Government in all this.
You wouldn't expect a hack to argue that the media should report less and I won't; if anything, we should report more. But some parts of the media have to get a whole lot better at explaining what this torrent of information they pour out means.
Simply breaking news about battered stock markets isn't good enough. Why is it happening, what does it mean and how important is it to my life? That's what people need to know.
Some of this 'breaking' news is no more than night following day. For example, there are known behavioural trends on Stock Markets, and no one should be surprised when the FTSE plummets during a recession (indeed, watch out for use of the term 'capitulation' over the next few days).
As for the Government...its own torrent of initiatives has already been widely derided by business as confusing and misleading. This survey almost suggests Government should do a bit less but explain itself a lot more.
There are also some clear lessons for consumer businesses in this report. The biggest is that the web is a wide-open door for you to get your name in front of people – providing you're talking the right language.
And it doesn't mean that your traditional business must necessarily be undermined by young whipper-snappers who can Twitter better than you can: while online is continuing to steal shoppers from the High Street, most of that online spending is in fact going to familiar High Street names, not net-only start-ups.
So ask yourself this question: if your well-established business is good at what it does, is there any reason why it can't be good at what it does online?