An Unscientific Look at Consumer Confidence

The general consensus that one gets from both news and editorial sources is that the American public is much more concerned about their economic well being than they are about our President's opinion of the latest National Intelligence Estimate; and, at this time of year, one of the best ways to assess the individual consumer's sense of economic well being is to observe Christmas shopping behavior. Of course increased activity in the digital world means that we can no longer do this strictly in the physical world, but Nicole Maestri's report from the physical world for Reuters still merits some attention. It is decidedly not the sort of story we would have gotten from the Ghost of Christmas Past:

The holiday tug-of-war is under way. U.S. retailers want to rack up sales now, not later.

Consumers, however, are resisting, playing the waiting game for bigger discounts closer to Christmas.

To win the battle, many retailers are enticing shoppers with so-called limited-time sales, hoping a deadline will convince them to spend money now -- and help stores avoid profit-crunching price cuts later in the season.

To get my own read on this "tug-of-war," I decided that I would walk through Union Square while on my way to the Noontime Concerts™ event at Old St. Mary's Cathedral. Bearing in mind that this is about as far from a "scientific method" as one could get, except for one rather depressed looking Santa (a Salvation Army woman who did not even have a Santa suit) in front of Saks, there was absolutely no feeling of it being Christmas time in what used to be the heart of downtown shopping in San Francisco. This may simply indicate that the "action" has left Union Square in favor of mall settings (one of which is a short walk over on Market Street). Right now, however, there is an intuitive gut-level feeling of economic depression, whatever the experts and their spin doctors may be saying; and I think it is a consequence of that element of consumer resistance that Maestri has described. Indeed, the very fact that we should be speaking in terms of consumer resistance, rather than confidence, may say more about that sense of economic well being than any economic analysis can tell us.