Those downward pressures, though, are being offset by a robust global economy that is providing a significant lift to exports, corporate profits and real wages, which finally picked up in the last year after stagnating for much of the decade. Optimists note that consumer spending is unlikely to slow as long as hourly wages are perking along at a nominal annual pace of about 4 percent, about 1.5 percentage points above the inflation rate.

“There clearly is a problem in mortgages,” said David Kelley, an economist at Putnam Investments, the mutual fund company in Boston. But “outside the mortgage market, we don’t really see the consumer stopping spending.”

Consumer spending has often defied dour predictions. There was no decline in spending during the recession of 2001, even as job losses mounted and business sentiment sank after the technology bubble burst. That is one reason the downturn was so mild compared with the harsher recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s.

Image Customers shopped for appliances recently at a Sears in Niles, Ill. Profit fell in the quarter. Credit... Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press

Economists also note that spending by higher-income consumers has a far more significant impact on the economy than purchases by those who are less well- off, a group that appears to be most vulnerable to declining home prices, resetting mortgages and job loss.

“There are essentially two consumer economies right now, and they parallel the split between the very rich and everybody else,” said J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich, the consumer research firm based in Norwalk, Conn. “There is one part of the consumer economy that is unlikely to be affected at all by the recent events in the financial markets. Those are the people making the loans. The people taking the loans, however, are the people who are affected.”

Mr. Tuberman sees that bifurcation in his furniture business.

Even as a number of competitors and distributors have gone out of business, Barn Furniture’s sales have held up, he says, because it receives most of its orders from repeat and longtime customers, who are drawn to his traditional wood products.