Posted on 11/07/2007 1:35:35 PM PST by 1rudeboy
Christmas is still nearly seven weeks away, and already the media are offering a “Bah, Humbug” for retail sales and the U.S. economy.
CNN shoveled coal at the positive economic news on November 2 and immediately moved into full Grinch mode.
“You know, just earlier this week the broadest measure of the economy, Kyra, the GDP, came in at 3.9 percent, stronger than expected. What’s working against it, though, the financials, concerns that we’re going to have a lot more carnage coming from that very important sector, consumer spending …” said “Newsroom” correspondent Susan Lisovicz.
Gloomy reporting about holiday sales is nothing new for the media. In 2005 the Los Angeles Times declared that shopping season was off to a “lukewarm” start, and CBS “Sunday Morning” declared Black Friday sales “were a bit flat.”
But all of that negativity didn’t keep Christmas from coming – in fact, retailers saw 6.3-percent growth of holiday sales in 2005. The National Retail Federation actually had to revise its sales forecast from 5 percent to 6 percent thanks to Thanksgiving weekend sales.
The media were similarly downbeat in 2006, using the terms “mixed performance,” “not so merry” and “lackluster” to describe seasonal sales – which ended up growing by 4.6 percent.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessandmedia.org ...
There was no real housing credit crunch last year or '04 through '06 and a gallon of gas was approx 60 cents cheaper per gallon last year at this time. This year maybe different and we might have a real slowdown.
Going to FL to visit my parents Thanksgiving.
I can see why retail executives might wish to lower expectations, but unlike the MSM, they don’t try to scare people out of coming to their stores.
ah, the smell of napalm in the morning!
The financial news is only targeted at Wall Street. Retail customers typically don’t pay as much attention to the ‘news’ as they do the advertisements for whatever the new ‘it’ product is this year. (If there is no ‘it’ product, then retail really IS screwed like they are claiming.)
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