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Number of the Week: Poorest Spending Less on Alcohol

$152: How much on average the bottom 20% of households spent on alcohol last year, according to the Labor Department‘s Consumer Expenditure Survey.

The poorest households spent less on alcohol in 2012 than at any time in the past 15 years, even as their overall spending was at its highest level since the recession hit in 2008.

As the wider population has managed to rebuild spending and the wealthiest Americans are making outsized gains, the lower end of the income spectrum continues to struggle.

Alcohol is a discretionary purchase that has to be cut back when budgets are tight, and spending on it has been trimmed substantially. When you adjust for inflation, the bottom 20% of households spent less last year on alcohol than at any time since 1984, the farthest back these data go.

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