Posted on 12/21/2007 6:44:59 AM PST by Para-Ord.45
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Consumers put aside worries about slumping home sales and soaring gasoline prices and headed to the malls in November, pushing spending up by the largest amount in 3 1/2 years.
The Commerce Department reported Friday that consumer spending surged by 1.1 percent last month, nearly triple the October gain. The gain reflected various promotional efforts by retailers such as heavy discounting and longer store hours at the start of the holiday shopping season....
What they do omit are a few salient facts.
- Christmass sales begin earlier now. So called Christmass catalogs are mailed out in September or ealier.
-Gift card sales are up over 50% but are not counted when purchased but only when spent.
-Online orders are not counted when placed, but only when the product is shipped.
those were the days.
50 dollars paid the rent.
freaks were still in circus tents.
November sales were high due to the huge discounts. Sept and oct sales were not great as people were saving up for the Nov sales they knew were coming. November also had more people shopping but spending less per person.
December sales right now are lackluster.
So the whole US economy is based on how much our populace spends at Christmas time? You’d think the government wouldn’t allow the ACLU and the anti-Christians to sue to keep people from celebrating to make sure the economy stays strong.
What a joke for the media and government to make such a big deal about Christmas spending. Is it the only thing keeping the economy afloat? They imply that the rest of the year businesses run in the red, and they only survive because of Christmas.
The Evils of Capitalism (barf).
My stepson is home from Berkeley for Christmas. I have not heard the word “Imperialism” so often in my life.
Years of my indoctrinating him is being undone by Berkeley professors indoctrination.
As someone said, gift cards, which HUGE are not even counted as sales until redeemed and that usually happens the week following Christmas. The Christmas shopping season no longer ends on 12/24 as it used to but on 12/31 or even later as the gift cards are cashed.
The so called experts have to be besides themselves with this consumer spending report since they are all in for a consumer spending collapse (high gasoline and heating oil prices, sub prime, yada, yada) leading to a recessions. I find it gratifying how little attention people pay to the media since it is quite obvious the media is doing all it can to bum out the population in order to help the lib candidates.
The majority of retailer lose money each month and depend on Christmas sales to put them “in the black”. That is why the Friday after Thanksgiving is referred to as “Black Friday”
Or could it be they are NOT worried about those things?
I'll wait for the revised figures in January. Seems to me that the parking lots are full, the stores are full, the checkout lines are long ... but I keep hearing that no one is buying anything because the economy is so bad.
Uh huh.
Hope you are not paying for the reeducation....LOL. Don’t worry if he has a firm foundation he will return to the light.
I don’t tink that’s QUITE right. I don’t think they lose money all year except at Christmas, I think they have fixed costs and it generally takes until November until they make enough sales to overtake the fixed costs and move into the black.
But as they report on a quarterly basis, and show profits each quarter based on quarterly costs and sales, it wouldn’t seem that my explanation is generally true either.
Speaking of banks, it's a good thing that we don't need them anymore to hold our money because most of them are currently insolvent if you apply FAS 157 accounting rules.
Anyways, we have outgrown them with all of the financial engineering and leverage dontcha know.
thanks for the encouragement.
Oh well, at least he is good for some laughs.
“What they do omit are a few salient facts. “
And just by virtue of this year’s calendar we have a long Thanksgiving-Christmas
time period of 32 days.
Some folks simply don’t shop for Christmas gifts until the last minute.
Easy fix, who controls the check book! Tell him to work his way through school.
Went to the Mall this week, not many cars or shoppers and Santa was all by himself.
Sales on our web site are the worse in 3 years and we have more AND better products this year.
Just my 2 cents.....
Read him this...
Try to imagine being an emigre from the Soviet Union; as I am; and sitting in the company of left-wing "intellectuals" who think they are oppressed. Picture coming from a society where a myriad of your relatives simply disappeared; where this relative or that family friend died under interrogation and torture for his/her beliefs; or for simply nothing at all. Think about Alexander Solzhenitsyn's account of the tortures that the Stalinist machinery inflicted for the objective of extracting "confessions." These tortures included laying a man naked on the floor, forcing his legs apart, and then an interrogator stepping on his testicles, applying increasing pressure until the confession surfaced. Keep in mind that many people refused to "confess." Then think about the Soviet secret police raping daughters and sons in front of their fathers and mothers; for the sake of extracting "confessions."
Now visualize me sitting in a graduate studies lounge in Toronto, listening to my colleagues explain to me that communism "isn't really so bad," that the Soviet Union made some "remarkable achievements," and that Western democratic-capitalism is the most oppressive system of all. At the same time, picture my lecturers having absolutely no respect for a free exchange of ideas on this subject.
Both of my grandfathers were exterminated by Stalinist terror. My father and mother both just barely escaped the Gulag. But here I am, with Ph.D. students, being treated to a one-hour discussion about "homophobia" on campus. My colleagues are agonizing about how "Homophobia-Free Zone" pink stickers must be put on every door in the university. "But what if a professor or a teaching assistant refuses to have one put on his door?" one of them asks indignantly. After a few seconds of silence, the other answers, "Well, then a committee might just have to be set up where these people will be taken to account." Serious head-nods follow.
Fascinating. Simply fascinating. The great issues of our time.
I remember when we first moved from Russia, my Mom was constantly crying. She was separated from her mother and brother -- who were also afraid to engage in correspondence because it was too dangerous for them. Sometimes my Mom would cry for what seemed like forever. I will never forget, as a nine-year-old, that feeling in my heart when my Mom cried like that. My consolations seemed to soothe her slightly, but I understood well that they were not the panacea for her grief.
The Soviet system did that to my mother.
Perhaps some of you might understand why I am not amused by the politics on campus. I am not amused by endless discussions of how we are all oppressed because we are being "attacked" by Pepsi commercials. "By trying to tell us that we are not cool if we don't drink Pepsi," a graduate student told me, "the capitalist machinery practices the politics of exclusion. By trying to pretend it offers us choice, it actually negates choice." And there is no debate permitted on this subject. The anti-capitalist theme is simply just drilled into your mind.
My mom's father was executed by the Soviet secret police. He did not have the luxury of being oppressed by Pepsi commercials. One day, when I was nine years old and living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, my father and I were on our way to Church. As we walked near the entrance, I spit on the ground. In a very serious but patient way, my father said to me: "It is ok to spit outside of KGB headquarters, but never in front of a place such as this." I never did it again. I was very wrong that day, because I had ignorantly spit on sacred and holy ground.
But there is another environment that is far from sacred and holy; today's politically correct campus. And there are certain individuals -- the most spoiled and self-centred people I have ever met -- who remind me of the scum who fostered the Soviet experiment, who promote the same ideas that gave us the Gulag, Mao's Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot's killing fields. Working fervently to destroy their own society, they praise other societies -- such as the one that caused my mother's eternal tears. They are our left-wing intellectuals. I spit in their faces.
Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He is the author of 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. His father, Yuri Glazov, was a Soviet dissident during the Brezhnev era, who signed the Letter of Twelve, denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. His mother, Marina Glazov, also participated in the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, actively typing and circulating Samizdat - the underground political literature. To avoid imprisonment, Yuri Glazov took his family out of the USSR in 1972 and settled in Canada in 1975, when Jamie was 9. Today Jamie battles socialism from his high-tech warroom in Toronto. He writes the Dr. Progressive advice column for angst-ridden leftists at EnterStageRight.com. E-mail him at jglazov@home.com.
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