Did Black Friday save the season? Beware the retail hype.
Barry Ritholtz
Washington Post
December 2 | Updated: Saturday, December 3, 10:20 PM
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Retail sales are spectacular, up 16 percent from last year! The best Christmas in a decade!
If you opened a newspaper or flipped on a TV last weekend, you were deluged with statements hyperventilating about holiday retail sales. Declarations that this was the best Black Friday in years, and it bodes well for the holiday season.
Savvy investors have learned to take these over-the-top declarations with a grain of salt. If you have paid attention in the past, the reality is far different from the spin: No Virginia, surveys of our gift-shopping intentions do not reveal our actual purchases. We humans are bad at forecasting the future and, as individuals, we are especially poor at predicting our own economic behavior. Marketers and trade groups, well aware of this, exploit that knowledge.
Let’s take a closer look
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/12/beware-the-retail-hype/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheBigPicture+%28The+Big+Picture%29
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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