Interesting graphic from the Sunday Times Business section.
I am not sure if I would have chosen 2003 as the starting date — 2006 might be more dramatic (albeit shorter timeline).
>
Shoppers’ Shifting Priorities
click for readable graphic
courtesy NYT
Category: Consumer Spending, Retail
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
Liquor & bars and restaurants are UP LOL. We need to dink our way out of the drecession!
Auto dealers blip up due to clunkers I presume
Dept stores look like a dying breed
They’re sure trying to spin sales at computer stores as a positive for some reason. But in fact they’re lower than at any time since 2003. So the rise above the baseline at the beginning of ’03 (which was the real start of the last recovery, effectively, not the Nov ’01 end of recession) is all due to that rise from the trough and it’s in a downtrend since the ’06 peak.
Indeed warehouse stores and department stores are mirror images of each other. Not hard to figure out what’s going on there.
The relentless decline of the department store really stands out as a secular trend. Let us toast the miserable, lingering death of the whole soulless mid-century commercial era, as best embodied by the utter failure of the “pseudo-eclectic corporate shopping mall as ersatz public square” concept.