Shoppers visiting San Francisco's Maiden Lane can spend US$104 for a butcher's knife from Sur La Table or US$2,500 for a lacquered Chinese table from Gump's.
Or they can look for a way to get out from under too much debt.
That is what more are doing. The Consumer Credit Counseling Service, in a drab concrete building between the two stores, handled calls from 2,100 people last month, helping with such basics as setting budgets or planning repayment schedules. Workers had helped 1,400 a year earlier.
The requests give another sign that a cooling economy has landed a growing number of Americans in financial trouble. Credit card holders repaid 13.7 percent of their outstanding balances in February, the smallest share since March 1998, according to a report from Moody's Investors Service. Evidence suggests personal bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures are rising.
"Consumers have increased their standard of living by credit spending and that's made the banks very rich and families very vulnerable," said Elizabeth Warren, a professor of bankruptcy law at Harvard University. "That's a prescription for disaster."
And while four interest-rate cuts this year by the Federal Reserve will make corporate borrowing cheaper and may spur consumer spending, the result may also be more problems, analysts say. At 4.5 percent, the target interest rate for overnight loans between banks is the lowest in six years.
For MBNA Corp, the largest independent credit card company, its cost of borrowing has declined more than yields on credit cards, analysts said. That's a reason the Wilmington, Delaware, company reported that first-quarter profit rose 33 percent from a year earlier. While profit fell at Citigroup Inc, the largest US financial services company, income from its consumer business rose 18 percent. Still, those companies face risks.
The delinquency rate rose to 5.3 percent from 4.8 percent in February 2000, Moody's said. At MBNA, the delinquency rate rose during the quarter to 4.6 percent of loans from 4.25 percent.
"The most expensive debt for consumers is credit card debt," said Warren at Harvard Law.
Data from BanxQuote Inc show the average annual percentage rate on credit cards is 15.52 percent. That's more than a percentage point higher than the average rate on an unsecured personal loan, and nearly 7 percentage points more than a home equity loan.
Still, credit cards have had a role in the record expansion, a decade old. Consumer spending typically accounts for two-thirds of economic growth. Spending increased at a 7.5 percent annual pace in the first quarter of 2000, the fastest in 17 years, before dropping to 2.8 percent in the fourth.
The economy cooled in tandem -- to 1 percent growth, the slowest in 5 1/2 years.
Consumers kept buying autos, homes and consumer goods, though, pushing the household debt load in the last three months of 2000 to 14.3 percent of disposable income, the largest share since the 1986 fourth quarter.
Even that didn't stop borrowing. It rose at a 10.5 percent annual rate in February, reflecting the biggest rise in credit card use in more than half a decade, Fed numbers show.
And as more borrowers lose their jobs, a rising number are facing up to debt loads they can't handle. "I just had a call from a woman laid off from Yahoo," said Bob Polis, an intake counselor at the San Francisco service. "She was worried about her credit report." Counselors are beginning to see more customers in upper-income brackets, said Polis. On Wednesday, he advised a couple in their 50s who run their own manufacturing business and have racked up more than US$60,000 in credit card debt, in part to help send two children to Ivy League universities.
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