Taxable sales include many of the things we need, and some things we simply want. Things like clothing, food, and house wares.
Economist and Chapman University Professor Esmail Adibi says these items are often the easiest to cut back on. He says spending less is a natural reaction to the drop in market and home values since the recession.
"Any time you feel you are poorer, you're not as wealthy as you used to be the day before, you react. So it is not just driven based on income decline it is based on your asset value decline which most of us experienced."
Adibi says because the economic crash was so great, recovery
will take longer. That's especially true for California, where the
unemployment figures hover just above 12 percent, consistently
higher than the national average.
Still, he says sales from July to September of 2009 were
better than the quarter preceding it, when taxable sales were down
nearly 19 percent.