The Retail Sales Paradox.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles.

Shoppers in March were vigorously buying, despite their expressed worries about the economic future.

The retail sales figure was surprisingly high today.

Shopping is therapy is probably not it.

A better theory is stocking up before tariffs.

Susan Schmidt is portfolio manager at Exchange Capital Resources. That's exactly right. And this is a very unusual

combination. Normally, when we see poor consumer sentiment, it means the consumers are buying

less. They don't feel as good about what's happening in the economy. This time, it's exactly the opposite.

Consumers are buying more. We had really high numbers for retail sales in March up 1.4% month over

month. And that just implies that people are really buying their goods ahead of those impending tariffs

that they expect to happen.

Which could indeed raise prices for all sorts of things, even if the long-term goal of those

tariffs is to increase employment. And you may have seen earlier this week, Federal Reserve Bank

of New York had an important survey of consumers. It showed that people's expectations that they might lose

jobs way up, up to 44 percent, think that U.S. unemployment will be higher a year from now.

I mean, that starts to get early pandemic levels. These readings and consumer sentiment and

expectations are some of the lowest that we've seen in several years.

So that really does show the concern that consumers are having.

This pre-buy of goods also is consumers looking forward over not just a month or two, but several years,

thinking about buying a car, auto parts, building materials,

things that they know they're going to need that could be as much as 25 percent or more

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