By Shirley Brady

Hard Times in America

Shoshana Zuboff's July 14 column for BusinessWeek.com, "Welcome to the Frozen Economy," marked a departure for the former Harvard Business School professor. She sat down with locals at Moody's Diner in Waldoboro, Maine, for an informal coffee klatch/focus group to find out if the economic slowdown was making Moody's diners even moodier—and how they were coping. Her resulting column generated some heartfelt (and some hard-as-nails) responses from our readers—as you'll see in the accompanying slideshow.