Coping strategies and changes in the satisfaction of consumer needs in Poland

During the process of transformation members of households face multiple new challenges, including the necessity to make new decisions and verify previous actions that were undertaken to fulfil their needs. These new requirements are reflected in active or passive strategies adopted by households to balance their budgets. The first behaviour, the fox strategy’, invokes individuals’ adaptation of outside conditions to their own needs and preferences, such as doubling their work efforts in order largely to preserve the earlier patterns of consumption. The second reaction, the ‘hedgehog strategy’, involves the ‘cultivation of a balanced budget’, that is, taking care that expenses do not exceed income by restricting the use of many goods and services and limiting expenses and any symptoms of waste. The third response is a crisis or ‘lemmings’ strategy. This strategy may be observed in situations of drastic fall in a household's real income, where the household must reduce its consumer property (sale of household goods, taking on a pawn loan), or resort to outside help, e.g. institutional assistance (benefits, relief). Looking at each type of strategy, it may be said that from 1989 to 1994, the percentage of households implementing active strategies did not change, the group of households putting an effort into the ‘cultivation of the family budget equilibrium’ increased, and the group of households adopting the ‘lemmings’ strategy’ grew decidedly

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