Target misses the mark but you're listening to Motley Full Money. I'm Mary Long joined today by Jason Moser.

Thanks for being here. I'm Mary Long joined today by Jason Moser.

Jason, thanks for being here.

Hey, Mary, thanks for having me.

Of course.

So today, Target reported earnings,

here's what I've got.

Comparable sales down 3.7% that's the fourth straight quarter of

declines there. Total sales down 3.2% traffic down 1.9%. Average

transaction also down 1.9% sounds like a lot of bad news. What's behind this?

Yeah, I mean it does it does sound like bad news it's kind of par for the course I guess for most retailers it feels like

with the exception of maybe a few but you know I think with Target I mean they're they're kind of coming off of some

challenges here recently and and when you look the release, when you look through the call,

management was very quick to sort of focus on the consumer and the normalization, right?

That's a word they used in the call that I think

accounted for a lot of what's been going on it's this normalization spending

patterns that they saw really emerging a couple of years ago as we kind of got back to normal right

where consumers are focusing a little bit more on services and

entertainment stuff outside of the home which makes a lot of sense right we were we're all kind of sequestered for a while

And in what they say curtailing those activities right during the pandemic. And I think what we saw, or what we're seeing at least with targets results,

obviously inflation and higher consumer prices,

still playing a role in their results and they're seeing some soft trends in

...