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Make Me Smart

The "little treat" economy

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

Business, News

4.6 ā€¢ 5.4K Ratings

šŸ—“ļø 16 September 2025

ā±ļø 18 minutes

šŸ”—ļø Recording | iTunes | RSS

šŸ§¾ļø Download transcript

Summary

The latest retail sales data shows U.S. consumers are still spending it up, even in the face of higher tariff costs and a shaky labor market. Wealthier Americans are driving the trend, but a ā€œculture of treatsā€ might also play a role. Marketplaceā€™s Kristin Schwab joins Kimberly to explain her theory. Plus, brands like Gap are pitching themselves to Gen Z by riffing on Y2K fashion. Are you onboard?


Hereā€™s everything we talked about today:


Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. We got fresh retail sales data today from the Census Bureau, and it looks like Americans are still spending, despite, you know, waves hand wildly,

0:24.1

everything going on. Retail sales were up 0.6% in August, even with the tariffs and the

0:30.8

weakening labor market. So today we're going to get into these retail numbers and what it is

0:36.4

that brands are doing to keep us apparently

0:39.3

successfully spending. My colleague Kristen Schwab is here to help us out. Welcome back, Kristen.

0:44.7

Hi, Kimberly. Good to be back. So what do these latest retail sales numbers tell us about

0:49.7

where the U.S. economy is right now? Yeah, well, the spending that happened in August, 0.6% from July,

0:58.6

that's higher than expected. Also, July was revised up, and August was the third month in a row that sales actually rose.

1:07.8

So I guess despite all of the worries about the tight job market and about tariffs and how

1:15.7

that might affect inflation and, you know, the inflation numbers rising that we've seen a little

1:20.1

bit in the past couple months, people are not so worried that they're not opening up their

1:25.3

wallets. In fact, they seem to be, they seem to feel

1:27.5

the opposite, pretty confident, despite what some consumer survey say about how people feel.

1:33.6

You know, this is something I always wonder about, especially when we do have like inflation

1:37.8

ticking up. When you look at the retail sales numbers, how much of an increase in retail

1:43.9

sales is just that consumers are spending more because they're buying more or they're spending more because stuff costs more?

1:52.8

Well, so when we get those census numbers like we got this morning, the inflation numbers are not in there. And then you have to sort of parse out that data.

2:02.5

What this month shows is that despite the inflation data, people are still spending.

2:08.2

So it's a little tale of two stories, and it's going to vary each month.

2:12.1

But right now, you know, a three-month increase in a row just shows that people are still, still feel confident and think that they're going to have the paycheck to support their spending.

2:25.0

Some categories that were especially high.

2:27.9

One is funny because it's e-commerce, which is important that we track when we think about trends and how people are spending money.

...

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