Retail sales rise by paltry 0.1% as shoppers feel pinch of high inflation
NY Post
Retail sales barely rose last month as Americans burdened by persistently sticky rates of inflation increasingly pull back on spending.
Data released on Tuesday by the Commerce Department showed that the value of retail purchases rose 0.1% in May — below analyst estimates of 0.2%.
Retail sales for the previous month were revised downward to 0.2%.
Of the 13 categories listed by the Commerce Department, five of them showed declines as gasoline prices dropped and furniture stores hawked Memorial Day sales, according to government data.
The lackluster numbers show a marked downturn in consumer spending after more robust figures earlier this year. Economists now expect spending to continue at a moderate pace as US shoppers grapple with stubborn inflation and a weakening job market.
“With … consumer confidence plummeting again, maybe households aren’t quite as impervious to higher interest rates as we were beginning to believe,” Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist at Capital Economics, said in a note to clients.
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Saks Global — owner of luxury stores including Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus — is cutting over 1,200 jobs as it shutters more than a dozen locations nationwide following its bankruptcy filing earlier this year.
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Amazon has been signaling that it wants a piece of the Saks empire — including possibly buying it outright — even as its prospects to break into the luxury market have been complicated by its controversial role in the retailer’s bankruptcy, The Post has learned.
The founder of a Vermont-based whiskey brand wants to give away a college campus that he bought during the pandemic — on the condition the new owner shares his vision for “the revival of our country and our civilization.”
WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Chris Wright predicted that Americans will continue to experience the pinch in their wallets at the gas pump for the “next few weeks,” but he was hopeful that prices could drop below $3 a gallon by the summer.
At the start of his term in January, Mayor Mamdani had the Big Apple’s lenders in his corner — despite his plans to remake the Big Apple economy under his socialist agenda.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is reportedly delaying the release of its next artificial intelligence model at least about two months after internal tests showed the tech falling short of rival models from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.
BuzzFeed on Thursday flagged going concern doubts and said it will not provide a forecast for 2026 as it evaluates strategic options, sending the digital media company’s shares down 7% after the bell.
Two Live Nation employees bragged about slapping customers with exorbitant fees at the entertainment giant’s venues, saying “these people are so stupid” that “I almost feel bad taking advantage of them,” according to court documents released late Wednesday.
Oil went on an unprecedented roller coaster ride at the start of the week, with the price surging more than 30% to near $120 a barrel late Sunday – only to erase all of those gains just hours later.
President Trump signaled on Wednesday that he plans to tap into the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to bring down rising gas prices.