Unintended Consequences

(Cartoon by Lee Judge/Kansas City Star (2/25/14) and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge.)

File this in the "Well, DUH!" box.

From the 2/21/14 New York Times:

Signaling how difficult the atmosphere for retailers remains across a wide range of customers, Walmart Stores and Nordstrom on Thursday both issued fairly weak forecasts for the coming year as they reported disappointing earnings for the fourth quarter.

 

Walmart cited international uncertainties like currency fluctuations and an economically struggling customer base at home as partial reasons for such sluggishness. ...

In a call with reporters, William S. Simon, the chief executive of Walmart U.S., said that cuts to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, crimped the company’s results. An exceptionally ferocious winter with multiple storms also cut into earnings, Mr. Simon said, detracting from a positive performance during the six-week holiday shopping period. He said the storms “aren’t an excuse, but merely an explanation.”

 

Ken Perkins, founder of Retail Metrics, said the company’s central problem was the plight of its core consumers, who are still struggling with stagnant wages and have been left out of areas of economic growth, like rising stocks and home values.  [Emphasis added]

It doesn't take an economics genius to explain the drop in earnings and the forecast for more of same, and I'm not talking about polar vortices, either.  When people don't have money to spend because they either aren't working or are making too little in wages, they can't spend. 

Maybe Walmart and Nordstrom could set an example and start paying decent salaries and provide such benefits as health insurance.  Or their lobbyists could start lobbying Congress to pass a reasonable minimum wage bill and an extension of unemployment.

In the meantime, I am just bitch enough to rather enjoy these corporations' fiscal discomfort.

Black Friday

(Click on image to enlarge and then hustle back.)


David Horsey really nailed this "Black Friday" nonsense beautifully.  It's really hard for me to even nitpick the man this time.

Admittedly, I am a guy who generally dreads the thought of plodding through a shopping mall on any day of the year, but to me the encroachment of Black Friday into Thanksgiving evening seems not only insane but also disturbingly unpatriotic. ...

Over the years, though, retailers have pushed the starting time for this mad dash earlier and earlier until now it is bumping up against the slicing of the pumpkin pie at the Thanksgiving dinner table. This does not seem right.

I pity the poor retail workers who have to leave home and hearth and turkey dinner on the most venerable national holiday of the year. Instead of giving thanks for the opportunity to be confronted by a greedy horde of bargain hunters, I suspect most of those workers are cursing the store owners who decided to ruin the day with their own lust for a dollar. I think it is safe to assume the guys who own Target or Best Buy or the other big retailers will not be manning the cash registers. No, they will be sharing a leisurely Thanksgiving repast with their heirs in the peace and safety of their gated communities.

In 2013, it will be exactly 150 years since Abraham Lincoln set aside the fourth Thursday in November as a national day of "Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens." Obviously, traditions shift over time, but let us hope that by next year those who put making money and spending money above all other values will not have totally desecrated what was once an all-American day like no other.

What is so disheartening is that so many American consumers are only too willing to go along with the retailers pushing the shopping day into Thanksgiving itself, thereby giving permission to the retailers to push even further.  And the kicker is that prices will be just as low, perhaps even lower, as the shopping season progresses.  All the retailers have done is to trick us into one more shopping day before Christmas.

I think Florence at Ruminations expresses my attitudes perfectly:  "No Thanks, Not For Me."