Target CEO Brian Cornell says shoppers are pulling back, even on groceries, as they feel stressed about their budgets.
In an interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick that aired Thursday morning, he emphasized that the retailer has posted seven consecutive quarters of declining sales of discretionary items, such as apparel and toys, in terms of both dollars and units.
“But even in food and beverage categories, over the last few quarters, the units, the number of items they’re buying, has been declining,” he said in the interview.
Because it’s misleading at best. If you and I were racing and I moved at twice your speed for four hours it would be misleading to say you were outpacing me when you start moving faster than me for four minutes. Just because you are now faster than me you are still very far behind and therefore it makes no material difference how fast you are currently moving. American workers are still in a hole caused by stagnant wages and corporate price gouging that’s lasted for decades.
I don’t think it was misleading, I think people didn’t read the whole comment. I said the trend reversed but we haven’t even caught back up to where we were in the 1970s. It’s going to take more than just one year of real wage growth to make up for stagnation and loss over decades. Wage growth is outpacing inflation for the moment, but this was just a recent change.
And likely temporary. I talked to my boss about our expected merit increase (stupid name, it’s just the inflation increase) and he said to not expect as much as last year, which was also below inflation. We source our numbers from the rest of the market and target something like 65-75 percentile (higher than average, but not top of market).
Last year we got ~5.5%, and this year will probably be a little lower (like 4-5% maybe).
You can’t catch up if you never out pace them, so of course it’s important and not misleading. You don’t think they talk about teams coming back from being down early on?
But more importantly, the claim that wages are stagnant is not just misleading, but outright wrong, and it was corrected. Why aren’t you calling out the actual false statement rather than claiming reality is misleading?