It was an odd place for an economics lesson - in the chair at my hairdresser's - but she was telling me that in the 27 years she has been cutting hair, she had never seen such tough times.
Her clients - most of them pretty well-to-do - were adding a week or two between cuts and a month or more between colorings in order to save money.
I was embarrassed into silence - I have been doing this for years. Ten haircuts a year cost less than 12, after all.
But my hairdresser made me realize, yet again, how my hand is on the spigot of this sputtering economy.
I canceled my cleaning service one week because my husband was coming in off two weeks on the road, and I wanted to give him a chance to sleep it off.
But when I looked around the house, I thought, "Well, it isn't that dirty. Maybe I could go with once a month instead of every two weeks and save a little money."
When the paperwork came from the landscape company asking me to sign up for another season of weed and feed, I wrote "Cancel" across the bill and sent it back.
When our wedding anniversary arrived, I invited friends to dinner at my house rather than go out to a restaurant, where a glass of wine can cost as much as a bottle purchased at my neighborhood wine store.
I have always felt that women make the big-ticket decisions that drive the economy in this country - we choose the house, the car and the furniture, just for starters.
But I am starting to think that decisions much more inconsequential than replacing the carpeting or the deck or the roof are also in our hands, and the impact of those decisions can be profound.
What is it going to mean to the hairdresser, the cleaning lady and the waitress if I am feeling poor?
If I don't buy a new car, Detroit will feel the pinch. But so will my insurance agent.
If I don't buy a new room full of furniture, there is a minimum-wage delivery guy who is in trouble - along with the suits at Pottery Barn headquarters.
Is this what Reagan meant by "trickle down economics"?
I wrote recently that if Congress wants to stimulate the economy, it should give a couple of grand to me, and women like me, and we will buy a new refrigerator or put a new front porch on the house.
Because of the kinds of nesting decisions women make, we could do a world of good for the economy with such a windfall.
But it is clear to me that the impact of my decisions runs much deeper, and into the lives of workers who depend on me to maintain a lifestyle that includes them.
Retail stores routinely tie the number of hours they can dole out to their employees to sales figures.
If I'm not shopping, the woman working the register for $8 an hour will feel it when her hours are cut, and so will her family.
I can make a joke right now about doing my patriotic best with an all-out spending spree, but the people who are on the fringes of my life - and on the fringes of this economy - won't be laughing.
One of my newspapers isn't arriving with much regularity, and I considered canceling my subscription. Why pay for what I am not getting when I can save $15 a month? But what about the guy who is paid to deliver that paper and who receives a regular, if modest, tip from me?
Newspapers are already in trouble. I know, I work for one. My own job depends on the subscriptions purchased by the cleaning lady and the waitress, and on the advertising placed by that retail store and that hair salon and that insurance company.
It seems that we are all in the same boat, and it is sinking.
susan.reimer@baltsun.com