January was not very spendy.

From Marketplace, I'm Sabrie Benashore, in for David Brancaccio.

We just got the latest retail sales data, that is how much we're buying in January sales were down 8 tenths of a

percent that is more than economists expected consumers have been complaining

about persistent inflation in higher prices so maybe now they're pulling back on spending a bit.

Susan Schmidt is head of public equity at the state of Wisconsin Investment Board.

Hi Susan.

Good morning.

So you know January is kind of a weird month right it's right after the holidays we've spent

ourselves silly it's cold we don't feel like spending but at the same time they're

supposed to adjust for all this stuff and the number was still down. What do we think of that?

Month or four month retail sales have declined. They haven't declined this much in

almost a year. So we are seeing a decline and that's because consumers just backed off. They spent a lot in December. Remember

those numbers were higher than we expected, but you are really seeing the difference here. The

estimate for month over month retail sales was to be down 0.2%

instead they came in down 0.8% it seems like a small difference but economists are

really going to tune into that because it is an indicator of how the consumer is feeling.

It's funny because earlier we got the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, and that was higher than expected, suggesting

that consumers were ramping up, that demand was high.

So how do we reconcile that?

And how are markets reconciling that?

Well this is what is going to keep investors guessing, and this is the volatility in the market that we're seeing right now.

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