By Nancy Mandell, guest blogger

Are you suffering from “frugal fatigue?”

If so, you’re among the many holiday shoppers—more than two-thirds of them women, by the way—who are believed to be succumbing to a malady as unique to the past year as the H1N1 virus. The cause of frugal fatigue is less mysterious than the origin of swine flu, however: It’s the economy, stupid! And as memories of the early pall cast by a lackluster Black Friday and Cyber Monday fade, retailers are seeing evidence that a good many shoppers have decided they’re “fed up and not going to take it anymore!”.

In the recession, women not only had to change their (shopping) habits—often putting their own needs at bay—but also to make more concessions than their male counterparts, explains Marshall Cohen, chief retail industry analyst for the NPD Group and author of Buy Me! How to Get Customers to Choose Your Products and Ignore the Rest, to be published next month. In fact, Cohen dates the start of the recession to the point where sales of women’s apparel began declining at a greater rate than men’s, all the way back to January 2007 “when we began to see the women’s market underperforming the men’s.”

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