Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market every day.

It's Tuesday, April 25th and we're talking consumer goods and exploring the supposed death of the retail industry.

For today only I'm your host Sarah Priestley and joining me in the studio all the way from

sunny Florida is our motley fool contributor Dan Klein.

Hey Sarah, we've been talking about doing this for over a year.

So it's...

We finally made it, but you have the B-list presenter today, so I'm really sorry about that,

but Vince is on vacation.

You know, it's funny, funny for our audience I should probably

point out that presenter means host.

Host.

Sorry.

Normally Vince is the host and Sarah is sitting in as the host today.

Yeah fantastic. Thank you for the clarification that we are not on a church show.

So I'll drive, I'll dive straight into what our topic for today is, it's the supposed death of the retail industry.

So retail spending as a whole according to the Census Bureau

is up 5% year every year and up 17% in the last five years. But the conventional

wisdom as you describe it in one of your recent articles, is that the retail industry is kind of dead, is dying.

And there's a lot of enthusiasm for that, and I'll play devil's advocate here for just a minute and kind of go into that.

So on the surface, there's a lot of evidence that backs up that point.

In the past year or two, we've had bankruptcies from Payless, the limited, Wet Seal, Gander Mountain Sports Authority, and recently

we're seeing a lot of news about store closures.

...