Of 2,723 consumers surveyed in June and July by the Yellow Pages Research Institute, 16% said they’ve shopped more frequently by catalog during the past year. But fear of terrorist attacks following Sept. 11 is not the reason. Only 5% of those who increased their use of catalogs cited safety concerns as the main reason.
Nearly half of all respondents (47%) said they shopped via the Web more during the past year than they used to, though just 1% said it was because they feared public shopping areas.
“We expected to find that people would make an effort to avoid public shopping places because of increased safety concerns,” Joel Raphael, director of the Yellow Pages Research Institute, said in a release. “Instead we found that the increased use of the Internet…is mainly a function of time and convenience.”