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...working part-time and those who have given up looking for work) at 16.8% and consumer confidence taking an unexpected 10-point drop in February, Americans are still feverishly chasing bargains. Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody's Economy.com, believes unemployment will hit 10.3% before peaking later this year...
Seasonally adjusted figures released by the Commerce Department on Friday show U.S. retail and food-services sales rose 0.3% from January and 3.9% from a year ago. If car and auto-part sales were excluded, the gain would be even bigger, 0.8% month-over-month and 4.2% year-over-year. (See 10 things to buy during the recession...
...results were roughly in line with same-store sales reported last week. In that report, owners posted a 4% year-over-year sales increase in February at stores they had owned at least a year, reversing the 4.7% decline posted during the same month a year earlier. Today's report casts a wider net, covering everything from mom-and-pop retail shops to car dealers, so the fact that it is similar to what big retailers were reporting says the February gains were broadly distributed - a positive sign for the economy...
Ellen Davis, a vice president at the National Retail Federation, says she started noticing a pickup in retail sales in January but believes economic indicators such as unemployment and the health of the stock market will play a major role in spending habits as the year progresses. "Jobs really is the biggest issue here," she says...
...encouraged" by the February sales numbers. She notes that many of the retailer sales were on full-priced spring items - not on heavily discounted inventory left over from the holidays, as was the case in 2009. Still, she points out that the healthy sales increase is against last year's "disastrous" first-quarter sales numbers, so "I don't want to paint too rosy a picture...