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Rise in retail sales signals stronger growth
Retail sales jumped in July, unhampered by an increase in fuel prices, according to government data.
Gasoline station nominal sales were unhampered by an increase in fuel prices? Shocking!
Retail Sales for July 2013 (Musical Tribute)
Click to enlarge.
Here's the best part.
July 1, 2013
California 3.5-cent gas tax hike kicks in for drivers
Prices are going up 3.5 cents. California drivers were already paying 36 cents a gallon in state taxes, but the hike means drivers will pay 39.5 cents. Including the other local, state and federal taxes, California drivers will be paying 72 cents in taxes on each gallon alone, making for the highest prices in the nation.
That's like a seventh of our country! Just look at all that unhampered growth in July! Amazing!
Aug 9, 2013
Restaurant sales, traffic sink in July
“July was a very disappointing month for the restaurant industry,” Lynne Collier, an analyst with Dallas-based Sterne-Agee, wrote in a report. “However, it is our view that we are not heading into a protracted downturn.”
Who said anything about protracted downturns? Why are we bringing that up at all? Resilient! Strong! These are the words I wish to hear! Unhampered growth I tell you!
The report said that based on conversations with numerous restaurant companies, Collier believes the downturn in sales resulted from the Fourth of July falling on a Thursday, poor weather and higher spending on big-ticket items such as homes and autos.
Thursday! Yes! Because nobody would ever think to take Friday off too! I certainly never did! Why burn a vacation day on that? Makes no sense! And nobody ever eats out on the 4th when it is a weekday. That's just nuts! No, sir. It's best to just go to bed early and sleep. That's what I love about the 4th: peace and quiet. You could hear a pin drop at 8pm around here. I swear!
Poor weather everywhere in the country! Simultaneously! For the entire month! And let's not forget all that higher spending on big-ticket items such as homes
This concludes the sarcasm report. Not much sarcasm this time let me tell you!
9 comments:
At least the news folks provide desperately needed humor...
Fred
Fred,
It was too hot. Customers didn't eat big meals.
Then it was too cold. Customers didn't drink as many beverages.
Then it was too wet. Customers didn't come due to the rain.
Then it was too dry. Customers didn't have jobs. The dust bowl took its toll on all of us.
Then it was too windy. We were all in the bunker waiting for the hurricane to pass.
Then it was too calm. We were stiill in the bunker as the hurricane's eye passed over us.
Then it was too windy again. We knew the worst of it was almost over though!.
And that, dear sirs, is when the volcano erupted.
I must regretfully inform you that we missed earnings estimates by 97 cents and had to take a non-recurring charge of $132.7 million. I realize that some of you must be wondering how this could happen to us 3 quarters in a row. All I can say is that it was a very disappointing quarter again and that we're making an even more serious effort to see that it never happens again. As you are no doubt aware, we cannot control the weather.
More unhampered retail news:
Macy’s shares fell 4.2%, the biggest S&P 500 decliner on Wednesday after the company’s second-quarter profit missed analysts’ estimates and comparable sales saw an unexpected decline. Macy’s cut its full-year profit and sales outlook, raising concerns about the critical back-to-school and holiday season sales in the second half.
From Marketwatch.
I think "unhampered" means when you dump your dirty clothes on the floor.
In MonoGame news I figured out how to get the "content pipeline" to output Mac-compatible shaders, essentially converting HLSL to GLSL.
Took around 5 hours, but every issue (save the last one) I ran into had a solution on Google, so it was just a matter of working through the many issues.
Good thing about waiting a bit for the pioneers to take the arrows is that resolving issues tends to take minutes and hours and not hours and days!
Like you, I'm kinda fossilized in the 1990s, tech-wise, but I've tried here and there to understand the new way of doing things with shaders instead of the fixed-function pipeline.
(XNA isolates all of that messy stuff, I got my 2D game going great on the Ouya in a couple of hours without having looked at XNA in several years.)
First XNA sample took about twenty minutes to port over to OS X.
The second one had those custom shaders, so figuring out WTF to get those compiled to what MonoGame on the Mac wanted took the bulk of the day.
Apparently the monogame content builders output Android, Linux, and IOS-compatible shaders, too, so that's cool. They're still working on PSM shader compatibility (for running on the Vita).
Vita isn't that important (unless you own a Vita!) and both Sony and Microsoft are angling on getting Unity3D available for homebrew dev.
But in the meantime, MonoGame stuff is a decent first step towards this Unity future.
Unity brings a lot of level editor functionality to the table, but it's not as quick a dev environment as Xamarin Studio / Visual Studio 10.
XNA was created by some very smart people, but Microsoft's f-ed up internal politics smashed everything late last year. $76B in cash, can't maintain development of their standout technology.
Mr Slippery,
I think "unhampered" means when you dump your dirty clothes on the floor.
Musical Tribute!
Troy,
Took around 5 hours, but every issue (save the last one) I ran into had a solution on Google, so it was just a matter of working through the many issues.
This video helped solved a serious rattling sound for us.
(Not much was added to GDP or job growth when we fixed our own dishwasher. Sorry about that!)
The Fed will impute that for ya!
$2T of our GDP is simply housing services, how much it costs to outbid the next guy for the tenancy.
Troy,
I bid 100 quatloos.
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