For all the hype about jobs and the booming (GDP) economy, the major portion of the retailer calendar around Christmas was a total bust. In many ways it was worse than last year, which emphasizes simply how the business “cycle” as it was understood in textbook economics no longer applies. The US economy, indeed the global economy as there are [...]
With everything that is supposedly going in the right direction right now, the US economy alone in booming out jobs and GDP, the last word you would expect to find attached to analysis of retailer performance during the Christmas season is “dismal.” The final numbers for the year have yet to be tallied, but the anecdotes have been trickling out [...]
The initial indications from private retail metrics on the Black Friday kickoff were not good, though numerous attempts to downplay those results were initiated. The monthly retail sales figures from the Census Bureau will make that much harder as they square with the downbeat Black Friday estimates. In other words, Black Friday wasn’t “off” because consumers were “pulled” to shop [...]
There is an undoubted shift in the behavior of consumers, including and especially during the peak retail season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. However, to say that is the sole reason for the decline in actual sales volume is to stretch that truth into (in many cases intentional) utter misdirection. The initial indications from the retail outlets are so far beyond [...]
If payrolls were indeed expanding at a robust clip, then we should be able to look forward to a Christmas retail season more like pre-crisis than anything of the past few years (especially last year). Of course, most initial indications of expectations for spending actually seemed favorable to such an outcome, which may not have been surprising either way since [...]
The largest calendar segments of the retail universe are back-to-school followed closely by Christmas. The peak month for back-to-school is August which is usually the third or fourth biggest month of the year in terms of raw retail sales; with October right behind as Christmas retailing ramps up. September, which falls in between back-to-school and Christmas (at least historically), was [...]
The orthodox notion of monetary policy, following its Keynesian root, is that spending for the sake of spending will lead to a healthy economy. It does not matter, to this philosophy, how or why that spending takes place; only that it does. If, for example, the Federal Reserve can “stimulate” the interest rate sensitive sectors of the economy, like automobiles, [...]
The retail sales release for August was actually quite alarming. The track of sales pretty much confirms the end of the spring “bounce” that showed up in Gallup’s figures, but the real concern is that the “bounce” itself was never more than a minor adjustment; an absence of further erosion as it were. That is nothing like what is being [...]
The wholesale trade figures still confound both the “rebound” narrative and the drastic revisions of GDP made in July. The broader context of wholesale trade remains as it has been since early 2013, as although growth appears to be increasing it is doing so at a deficient rate. That counts for both inventory and sales, though there is, I believe, [...]
Maybe using the word “troll” in this sense is overdoing it, but in more than one way it seems deserved given what has been presented. The retail picture so far at the beginning of the back-to-school season has been, at best, mixed. But you don’t get that idea from most of what is presented. As Thomson Reuters starts its latest [...]
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