It's Wednesday, August 16th.

Welcome to Market Foolery.

I'm Chris Hill joining me in studio today

for Motley Fool Funds, Bill Barker.

Happy Wednesday.

Thank you.

More retail.

We're past the peak of earnings Palusa, but we do have some more retail earnings.

Yes. And we'll do retail reports late usually. Why is that?

Because they get the January month end, sort of, because a lot of the sales occur after Christmas.

So to get a better, you know, picture of the whole quarter you need to include January

along with December. So it's not that retailers as a group are Divas and they're

like we just want the spotlight on us that too okay we'll dip into the full mailbag too but let's start with target second quarter

second quarter profits look good and probably more importantly for Target, same store

sales on the rise and that comes after four straight quarters of falling comps.

So if you're if you're a target shareholder you got to be happy

about that. Yeah it's better. The same store sales are as close to flat in the positive categories you can get really up 1.3% for the

quarter and the guidance is around 1% flat plus or minus 1% going forward. So not even really keeping up with the pace of inflation.

So it's better, better than a negative number, but this is what passes for good news in in retail these days.

Do you think Target might be sandbagging just slightly because if the most important time of the year for retailers like

Target is the holidays at the end of the year the second most important time is

back to school and that's the current quarter and

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