AND HERE is a little something that could possibly make you look again and say: 'Are you sure? That's not the way I heard it.'
What you have probably heard is the reason shopkeepers are complaining of slack business is cuts or freezes in wages and salaries across the SAR. People have neither the money to spend nor the inclination to do so when our economy is slowing and the pundits speaking of worse to come.
I grant you that people may not have the inclination when they are worried about the future, but the available figures say it is not true that they do not have the incomes.
Look at the first chart. That short red line on the right side of the chart gives our nominal wage index over the past two years and, indeed, it says wages have remained flat throughout. Notice, however, that it says wages on average have not fallen. Some have gone down but others have still gone up and it all roughly balances out.
The important thing to the wage earner, however, is how much he or she can actually buy with that wage, and remember here that consumer prices have fallen since May 1998. This is taken into account in the real wage index, the blue line in the chart, and just look at how sharply it has risen since that time.
What these figures tell you is that the overall buying power of the wages people make has improved more markedly over the past three years than almost any other time on record.