The first time I can consciously remember using the term landmine was probably here in February 2019. I had described the same process play out several times before, I had just never applied that term. There was all sorts of market chaos in the final two months of 2018, including a full-on stock market correction, believe it or not, leaving [...]
US retail sales were disappointing in December 2019, though it depends upon your perspective for what that means. Unadjusted, total retail sales were 6.01% more last month than the same month of the prior year. It was the highest year-over-year growth rate since October 2018. The reason was entirely due to base effects. You might remember Christmas 2018 for its [...]
Gone are the days when Black Friday dominated the retail calendar. While it used to be a somewhat fun way to kick off the holiday shopping season, it had morphed into something else entirely in later years. Scenes of angry shoppers smashing each other over the few big deals stores would truly offer, internet clips of crying children watching in [...]
I was expecting quite a bit more, but perhaps should not be surprised at what was actually delivered. The National Retail Federation (NRF) after delaying its Black Friday retail spending estimates updated them later today for the now designated Thanksgiving Weekend. These new figures capture spending activity on both Thanksgiving Day itself as well as the much-discussed Cyber Monday. The [...]
As expected, Cyber Monday hit records all across the retail industry. According to Adobe Insights, sales recorded by online outlets, including those of traditional brick and mortar stores, hit $6.59 billion. That’s a record not just for a Cyber Monday but any single day in the internet’s two decades of mainstream usage. It was, Adobe said, a gain of 16.8% [...]
Black Friday was once the king of all shopping. A retailer could make its year up on that one day, often by gimmicking its way to insane single-day volume. Those days, however, are certainly over. Though the day after Thanksgiving still means a great deal, as the annual flood of viral consumer brawl videos demonstrate, it’s just not what it [...]
Given that Black Friday weekend, including Thanksgiving itself, was uninspiring, the fact that the Commerce Department’s estimates for retail sales for all of November were again among the worst shows that Black Friday actually remains a pivotal part of the holiday setup. The trend has been to dismiss the traditional Christmas buying season kickoff as if earlier discounts might have [...]
Janet Yellen and orthodox economists claim that the economy can only be gaining, and that word is taken, on faith, as if some updated, modern gold standard for meaning. No matter the contrary in actual evidence and observation, the “word” remains as if diktat were the only employ. It has produced some very strange dichotomies, particularly of late, where those [...]
If central banks are now almost exclusively on the defensive, we have no shortage of anecdotes and data to explain it. For a good long while economists and commentary managed to keep the US safely “decoupled” from the “overseas” maelstrom, but the deluge locally has become far too much to ignore. This is far, far deeper than just some indistinct [...]
With back-to-school shopping falling apart, the focus turns quickly to the Christmas season once more. That is fully expected, lest anyone dwell too long on the August spending figures and begin to see through the “strong” economy. August retail sales – as expected – showed the effects of slow mall traffic and comparisons with very strong August results a year [...]
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