NPR.

Over the past several months, the American consumer has been on a roller coaster ride.

Right before President Trump took office, consumer confidence was rising studally.

Many voters and businesses felt optimistic that Trump would be good for the economy. But then,

as Trump rolled out round after round of new tariffs on U.S. trading partners, things, they took a turn.

By May, consumer sentiment had plunged to near record lows.

And then just in the past couple of weeks, it turned back up.

Even with this recent boost of consumer confidence, the fact remains that consumers today are feeling way less optimistic about the economy than they were at the start of the year.

And that is having a significant effect on the way consumers consume.

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong.

And I'm Adrienne Ma. Earlier this month, we did a little survey of our own, non-scientific, of course.

But we asked listeners, how is this moment in the economy affecting

your spending habits? And you responded. So today on the show, we step off the roller coaster

for a second and check in directly with the American consumer. Americans are big spenders.

Consumer spending makes up two-thirds of our economy, and per person,

we spend more on consumption than almost any other country in the world. So we wanted to know if the past few months have affected that. And one big takeaway from the responses we got was

that a lot of you are worried.

Lately, I've noticed that I've been way more careful about making big purchases.

This is Nicole Potenza from Morristown, New Jersey. And I think part of that's me being anxious about the economy and the possibility of a recession.

But then at the same time, I've been spending more on

little things like coffee or takeout. And I guess that's probably me trying to take care of

myself when everything feels kind of uncertain. What Nicole is describing here actually resembles

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