I'm Julia Borsden, and you're listening to CNBC's Tech Check. Our show is live weekdays at 11 a.m. Eastern, listen in.

Good Wednesday morning. Welcome to Tech Check. I'm Deirdreboza with Carl Kintania and John Fort, who continues his whirlwind tour. He's live from RBC's Global Technology Conference in New York.

Today, the NASDAQA racing this week's gains as questions continue to grow around the consumer heading into make or break holiday season.

More on the key tech names at risk this hour.

Plus, a look at the street's top e-commerce names amid the volatility, why it's no longer and everyone wins market.

And finally, do not miss our exclusive with IBM chairman and CEO Arvin Krishna.

That's happening in just a moment.

He's going to sit down with John ahead of a keynote speech at that RBC conference.

We're going to kick off today's feed, though, with the latest consumer warning.

Target down double digits, seeing its worst day since May after profits fell 50% in Q3 as the company

reports a, quote, precipitous decline in consumer demand that they say only got worse in recent

weeks. And while the company is planning $3 billion in cost cuts, they're not the only ones

tightening the belt this week. Amazon, as you know, laying off workers in its Alexa and Lunac Cloud gaming units, two parts of the business most likely to see an impact as consumers cut back on their discretionary spending. John, it's interesting. A lot of inventories coming in in the case of Target sooner than they had been expecting at leading shipping rates to come way down, but more goods and bloated inventories

means more promotions and more layoffs. Yeah, Carl, exactly. And their overall inventory levels

have been coming down quarter over quarter, but then, you know, consumer demand also slowing

down. So this goes to what we've been talking about here for several weeks. And I think it also goes to it's important. There's a difference between what's happening with the higher end kind of upper middle class, middle class, upper middle class consumer and that mainstream Walmart and Target Chopper. I think maybe that accounts for a little bit of the difference in tone and color between

lows and Target, right?

They're really talking about different groups of people.

And even when you look at Walmart, Walmart being the biggest grocery retailer in the country,

people need food.

They're paying more for it that leaves less money for them to spend

on other things at Walmart or, hey, at Target.

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