{"id":22120,"date":"2013-09-15T10:18:25","date_gmt":"2013-09-15T15:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22120"},"modified":"2013-09-15T10:18:25","modified_gmt":"2013-09-15T15:18:25","slug":"back-to-school-shopping-fails-to-rescue-the-clothing-chains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/15\/back-to-school-shopping-fails-to-rescue-the-clothing-chains\/","title":{"rendered":"Back to school shopping fails to rescue the clothing chains"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We all spent less than we were supposed to last quarter, and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/contributed\/2013-09-14\/%E2%80%9C-difficult-second-half%E2%80%9D-fabulous-excuses-clothing-retailers-sales-fall-apart\" target=\"_blank\">clothing business is feeling tight<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Fantasies about a strong back-to-school shopping season had already gotten slammed when teen retailer American Eagle Outfitters, back in August, chopped its second-quarter earnings in half and confessed to lousy sales &mdash; down 2% overall and 7% on a comparable-store basis. CEO Robert Hanson blamed weak traffic and women who hadn\u2019t bought enough of the stuff on the shelf. \u201cThe domestic retail environment remains challenging,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n<p>Competitor Abercrombie &#038; Fitch reported its quarterly results the same day. While total sales were down \u201conly\u201d 1% year over year, booming international sales &mdash; up 15% overall and up 60% in China on a comparable store basis &mdash; papered over a debacle in the US, where sales plunged 8%. CEO Michael Jeffries summed up the US phenomenon: a \u201cchallenging environment,\u201d \u201cweaker traffic,\u201d and \u201csoftness in the female business.\u201d While \u201cconsumers in general\u201d might be feeling better, he ventured, \u201cthat\u2019s not the case for the young consumer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Alas, by today, his \u201cconsumers in general\u201d had gotten the blues too, according to the University of Michigan\/Thomson Reuters consumer-sentiment index. It plunged from 82.1 in August to 76.8 in September, the lowest since April. \u201cEconomists\u201d on average had expected a flat 82 &mdash; they don\u2019t get out much, do they? Particularly brutal was the collapse of the economic outlook index from 73.7 to 67.2, the lowest since January. So, a retail recovery in the second half? Maybe not so much.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We all spent less than we were supposed to last quarter, and the clothing business is feeling tight: Fantasies about a strong back-to-school shopping season had already gotten slammed when teen retailer American Eagle Outfitters, back in August, chopped its second-quarter earnings in half and confessed to lousy sales &mdash; down 2% overall and 7% [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,13],"tags":[618,366,289],"class_list":["post-22120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-usa","tag-clothing","tag-consumerism","tag-polls"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5KM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22121,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22120\/revisions\/22121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}