Word: retailing
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...good market rally; consumer confidence is up. What's not to like? Rosenberg: There's absolutely nothing wrong with consumer confidence going up, but it's really a matter of watching what consumers are doing as opposed to what they're saying. If you take a look at the retail sales data over the past couple of months, it has moved back down. It looks like consumer spending, after a bit of an increase in the first quarter - mostly just bargain-hunting in January - is also relapsing in the second quarter. I'm not really seeing evidence in the actual...
...more for optimists. On May 27, WSL Strategic Retail, a highly respected consulting firm, released its latest "How America Shops" survey. The company found that in 19 of the 32 spending categories it tracks, fewer consumers are cutting purchases now than they were a year ago. For example, last year 58% of the survey's respondents said they were cutting back on purchases of frozen food. Now only 34% said they were spending less on those items. Last year, 41% of consumers said they were cutting back on cereal. That figure has now dipped to 26%. (See pictures...
...than just food. In May 2008, for example, 50% of shoppers said they were spending less on skin-care products. This past April, 38% were cutting back. People are also cutting back less on over-the- counter medication and clothes, which is particularly good news for the many apparel retailers that have been battered by the recession. Of the 13 remaining categories that WSL Strategic Retail tracked, not one showed a significant increase in the percentage of consumers cutting back. In each of these cases, the levels were essentially flat...
...what's the takeaway from this data? First, some recession fatigue has set in. "People have done an awful lot of cutting back in the last 18 months," says Wendy Liebmann, CEO of WSL Strategic Retail. "There's not much more they can do. They've figured that it's not the end of the world here, and there are places where you can open up your wallets." She points to another stat: 1 in 4 of the shoppers WSL surveyed said they were "tired of watching every little penny and are ready to break out a little...
Compared with face-to-face counseling or medical treatments, online therapies are typically simpler and less expensive. Major health insurers like Blue Cross and Aetna even offer Web-based anti-insomnia programs for free (you can check out the retail versions at cbtforinsomnia.com or myselfhelp.com for as little as $20). And there's growing evidence that online therapy really works: in the new Sleep study, 81% of participants who completed a five-week, online program for insomnia reported improvement in sleep...