“U.S. Retail Sales Fell 0.2% in February”

“U.S. Retail Sales Fell 0.2% in February” in The Wall Street Journal was published by Harriet Torry at 1:12 p.m. on April 1 of 2019. The article talks about how there has been some hesitation among consumers in February, as the rates of retail sales have decreased quite a bit in comparison to where they were before. It demonstrates how retail sales were revised as being higher in January, which is something that makes this phenomenon a bit difficult to understand. However, the article talks about how this is not something that is bringing up too much concern, as there have been analysts and economists working with one another to understand whether this is something that is going to continue and worsen or stall and stop. They attribute these changes in spending to the timing of tax returns, claiming that this is temporary and that the nation is not going to suffer from this as much as they might believe. It also states that this is something relatively difficult to read, considering that they are unsure if this has directly to do with the conditions of the market or if it has directly to do with consumers’ attitudes towards the products that are available to them at the moment. It states that data on retail sales can be somewhat volatile when it is gathered on a monthly basis, and that it is not as easy to interpret it as it might be for sectors such as housing and healthcare. However, this does provide a concern in the marketing sphere as a whole because of how it is difficult to read how one’s spending patterns in retail might be attributed to their attitudes towards the market, but because of how this is so difficult to measure, it is something that would be almost impossible to generate based on how individual surveys and interviews would need to be conducted to figure out these attitudes. As a result, there need to be new ways through which this retail data can be interpreted in order to understand its overall impact on the market, focusing on how this reflects the way that people see the market in its current position and situation, as well as how this reflects how willing they might be to continue investing or becoming involved with it in the first place. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/retail-sales-dropped-0-2-in-february-11554121937?mod=searchresults&page=17&pos=3