Let me first offer my apologies to ShopGirl and all of my friends who probably consider me an abomination and an insult to my gender, but I hate to shop.

I think my hatred for clothes shopping began when I was 12 years old, searching with desperation for Levi Strauss corduroys with a 24-inch waist and a 36-inch-long inseam.

It seemed nearly every other girl in my school had at least three pair of the fashionable pants in gray, navy blue and rust, but Levi cords in my particular size didn’t exist in the Newport, Bangor or Waterville areas. I insisted to my mother that we keep looking, but our trips from store to store were fraught with impatience and left us both drained and surly.

I love browsing through quaint gift shops in pretty downtowns, and I can get excited about the Home Depot, but put me in a mall or other major department store and my throat gets sore, my eyes dry up and my temples throb.

I also sweat bullets in traffic jams and have a natural fear of teen drivers. So a trip to the Bangor Mall area last weekend – my niece, armed with her learner’s permit, at the wheel – was, simply put, pure, miserable hell.

So I was not in the greatest of moods when I finally collapsed in a chair later that night to look at the paper. The front page headline, screaming that more middle-class Americans are having a hard time stretching their paychecks, caught my eye.

I don’t get it. We are bombarded with story after story on how middle-class Americans are caught in a tightening financial vise grip. Bill Rae of Manna Inc. in Bangor said this week that more and more working families were depending on Manna to provide them with supplemental food to get them through the week.

Grocery prices have skyrocketed. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, food prices in September were 4.5 percent higher than last year.

The middle class is struggling and teetering on a precarious edge of financial ruin, according to many experts. So where the heck are all the shoppers coming from? I know there is an influx of Canadians with the currency exchange rate near equal for the first time in many years, but that can’t account for all or the majority of people cramming the stores and restaurants here.

Either families have much more expendable income than the experts would have us believe or they are going further and further into debt.

Seems few of the nation’s economists can agree.

Some, such as Robert Frank, an economics professor at Cornell University, claim we are a generation lured by luxury and spend money on items that not long ago were reserved for the wealthy, such as big-screen TVs, surround-sound systems, granite countertops and professional gas grills.

Basically, we are a generation of parents teaching a generation of children to overindulge with little thought to willpower or savings, many say.

Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School, counters that middle-class Americans, those earning, say, $46,300 per household, spend 21 percent less of their income on clothing than they did in the 1970s. Though today’s family eats out more than ever, Warren contends today’s typical American family of four spends about 18 percent less on food than the typical family of the 1970s.

She blames housing and education costs for the cash woes of the middle class.

Far be it from me to argue with a professor from either Cornell University or Harvard.

What I know is that almost everyone I talk to is complaining about the price of groceries, and many say they are having a harder time making ends meet than one or two years ago. I know that a gallon of milk was $4.99 on Friday; it was $1.55 cheaper than that at an area big-box store.

I know that it seems unfair, but it’s more expensive to feed your children healthful food than a steady diet of chicken nuggets and french fries. That’s a very sad reality.

I know that a harsh heating season is upon us and that it will send more “middle-class” families in Bill Rae’s direction.

Yet at the same time, I know that we spent months trying to find a contractor to build a modest addition onto our family room basically to accommodate a second bathroom. I got dozens of calls returned for contractors who already were too busy working on other homes throughout the area.

We finally got an appointment for next spring.

I know there seem to be plenty of people shopping and spending money, despite the doom and gloom stories about our economy. I know experts argue whether the average credit card debt per family is $2,000 or $8,000. Either way, I know I’m glad I’m not average there.

And last, I know that despite the trauma of my childhood corduroy shopping experience, I wish I still had that tiny little waistline.

Renee Ordway can be reached at rordway@bangordailynews.net.