So much for the “green shoots”:
Halfway through the back-to-school shopping season, retail professionals are predicting the worst performance for stores in more than a decade, yet another sign that consumers are clinging to every dollar.
Fears about the job market have resulted in sluggish customer traffic over the last few weeks, spurring the gloomy sales projections. Parents who do shop are aggressively trading down, informing status-conscious teenagers that notebooks from the dollar store or shirts from Costco will have to do this year.
Stock analysts at Citigroup are predicting a decline in back-to-school sales for the first time since they began tracking the figures in 1995. They estimate August and September sales at stores open for at least a year — known as same-store sales — will fall 3 to 4 percent, compared with an increase of nearly 1 percent in the same period last year.
Its not so much a matter of holding on to every dollar but having far less dollars to spend. I know my income has gone down – not by much, for now, but it is less than it was last year and looks to get worse as time goes on. This shows up in large and small things – from as large as denying myself a new car, to as small as just not buying that shirt I saw at the store. The money just isn’t there for as much as I might have wanted a while ago – and this is getting general around the economy and for 500 points, who can tell me what we call a deflationary spiral combined with a recessed economy?
Yes, kiddies, its called an Economic Depression. The only question is whether it will be a “Great” one, like the last one – and the answer to that will lie in DC. The more we ape Hoover/FDR’s asinine response to the Great Depression, the more like it our Depression will be.
As I keep saying, we have to earn our money – we gambled it for nigh on a century and the house has called in our chips. We’re done. Broke. Wiped out. The sooner we get back to work and start creating wealth the sooner we’ll get out of this. I know I’m getting boring about this – but Make, Mine, Grow is the only ticket out.
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