It's Wednesday, December 15th.

Welcome to Marketfoolery.

I'm Chris L. With me, once again, Jason Moser, extra being here.

Well, it's always a pleasure, thanks for having me.

We've got a preview of our year-end review special on Motley Full Money, which is coming

later this week, but the word of the day is retail.

And let's just start with the monthly retail sales report that we got for the month of

November.

Sales up just 0.3%, which is half a point lower than analysts were expecting.

And there are a couple of different ways we can go here.

Let me start with this, though, that a lot of people in the financial media seem very eager

to tie this to the rise in inflation.

And I'm not discounting that completely, but I do wonder if part of this modest gain that

we saw in November is the fact that we had a big gain in October that a lot of people,

as we've been saying since late August, early September, sort of telling people, get

your shopping done early, is it possible that's at least part of what we're seeing?

I would think so.

I mean, I absolutely think that's part of it.

I mean, you could see even in the retailers themselves from Amazon to Target, Walmart, I mean,

the biggest retailers around the country decided to go ahead and get there.

Their holiday shopping seasons started earlier than the normal it seemed.

And so I'm sure that pulled forward a lot of demand.

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