The House Financial Services Committee this week approved an amendment to the Investor Protection Act of 2009 — a name George Orwell would appreciate — to allow most companies to never comply with the law, and mandating a study to see whether it would be a good idea to exempt additional ones as well.

Still, a few months of healthy sales may be a sign that some consumers are experiencing what Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for market research company NPD Group, calls “frugal fatigue.”

“They are getting tired of having to be so frugal and not spend on anything,” he said recently while observing the packed shoe department of a Bloomingdale’s in Short Hills, N.J., during a sale. “Repairing those boots yet again? Nah. Time to step out and buy a new pair.”

The predicament of Walter Benda is typical. In 1995, he was living with his wife of 13 years in her home country of Japan. According to Benda, he wanted to return to the U.S. and she did not. One day, she disappeared with their two daughters. “Please forgive me for leaving you this way,” she wrote in a note she left. The Japanese police, Benda says, would not investigate what they viewed as a family matter; it took him three and a half years to find the girls. He never won visitation rights. “It took a couple of years before the courts even interviewed my children,” he recalls. “By that time, they’d been brainwashed and didn’t want to see their father.”