"People stop buying postponable goods, and consumption levels decline," he said.

"Our products after all are postponable; they can decide to fix a washer and not buy one."

Biologists who study aging are beginning to suspect that the final curtain may at least be postponable.

If there's any stress, it's on the bigger-ticket, postponable durables.

Men's wear, the most postponable of purchases, turned sluggish and that may signal a significant slowdown."

Expensive, postponable items were the first to suffer, but non-auto retail sales as a whole began to fall after rising four years in a row.

"Consumers will postpone purchases of anything that is postponable," Mr. Hastings said.

Companies like Panasonic and Yamaha say sales of stereo receivers, which would seem to be postponable expenses, are flat over all.

Not even postponable."

Hunger is not among the postponable wants, and a day, even a few hours, in such a condition is often the crisis of a life of ruin.

Some of the reason for this was that those with postponable care were discharged, but mostly because the public and private facilities unified de facto during the crisis.

While the boast is accurate for life-threatening circumstances like emergency appendectomies, Mr. Davidson says, it is not for postponable treatments like hip replacements.

Durables - goods meant to last at least three years - tend to be postponable items bought with discretionary income, and analysts were encouraged that consumers still seemed willing and able to spend.

In addition, the Young Plan divided the annual payment, set at two billion Gold Marks, US$473 million, into two components, one unconditional part equal to one third of the sum and a postponable part for the remaining two-thirds.

It's not, in a recession, the people who are unemployed that cause the reduction in spending as much as it is the people who are employed who fear they may become unemployed that call a halt to the postponable spending.

But for far too many older Americans, the so-called Golden Years are tarnished by diseases that seriously undermine the quality of those extra decades - diseases that with tools now at hand are usually preventable, postponable or detectable at a curable stage.

Permanency planning sounds like the choice any reasonable parent would make, and yet the barriers to it will be familiar to any adult who has delayed writing his will or making arrangements for her own funeral: planning for one's own death is hard, and postponable.

If so, where was the general coverage of the recent study showing poor pregnancy outcome among women receiving routine Doppler ultrasound scans?- or of the large scale trial in the United States showing that half of the coronary angiography being undertaken is unnecessary or postponable?