Put another way, this particular economic shock — one that has halted much in-person spending, even by rich people who never lost their jobs — has been devastating for an economy in which many low-wage workers count on high-income people spending money.
Mr. Stepner and the economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and John Friedman have collected data from credit card processors, payroll firms and other private companies tracking how and where people spend their money, and how businesses and their workers have been affected as a result. By tying debit and credit card spending back to the home ZIP codes of millions of anonymized cardholders, they estimate that households in the bottom quarter of ZIP codes by income cut their spending by about 30 percent from pre-coronavirus levels at the lowest point in late March. Now, with the help of government stimulus, low-income spending is down only about 5 percent.