Gross Domestic Product, Second Quarter 2021, Grows 6.5 Percent

At W.S.J., "U.S. Economy Grows Beyond Pre-Pandemic Level":

U.S. gross domestic product grew at a 6.5% annual rate in the second quarter, up slightly from earlier in the year, pushing the economy’s size beyond its pre-pandemic level.

The growth came as business reopenings and government aid powered a surge that is expected to gradually slow in coming months, with Covid-19 variants and materials and labor disruptions clouding the outlook.

Second-quarter growth fell short of economists’ forecasts. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal estimated that gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services made in the U.S., grew at an 8.4% annual rate in the April-to-June period.

Still, the growth propelled GDP beyond pre-pandemic levels, a milestone that underscores the speed of the recovery that began last summer. Widespread business reopenings, vaccinations and a big infusion of government pandemic aid this spring helped propel rapid gains in consumer spending, the economy’s main driver.

“The economy has come roaring back faster than people expected,” said Jay Bryson, chief economist at Wells Fargo Corporate and Investment Bank.

Economists expect growth to remain strong, fueled by job gains, pent-up savings and continued fiscal support. Still, many say growth likely peaked in the second quarter and will cool as the initial boost from reopenings and fiscal stimulus fades.

Rising inflation, continued supply-chain disruptions and a shortage of available workers are additional factors that could restrain growth. The highly contagious Delta variant of Covid-19 also poses an increasing risk to the economic outlook.

There are two main ways the spread of Delta could derail the robust recovery, economists say. Some state and local governments could reimpose restrictions on businesses. Second, consumers could curtail spending on travel, dining out and moviegoing out of heightened cautiousness toward the variant’s spread.

So far, new restrictions have been limited in scope. They include the reinstatement of indoor-mask rules in some localities such as Los Angeles County. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Tuesday that vaccinated people resume masking indoors in places with high or substantial transmission of coronavirus.

Americans don’t appear to be retreating into their homes as the Delta variant spreads. Flight volumes and hotel-occupancy rates continue to rise, according to an analysis of real-time data by Jefferies LLC. Public-transit usage is also gaining ground, though it is down compared with pre-pandemic levels, Jefferies said.

The increasing level of vaccinations in the U.S. has made people more likely to keep working and spending money despite the rise in cases.

“I really don’t expect anything like we saw in the spring of last year,” said Ben Herzon, executive director at forecasting firm IHS Markit. “Going forward we’ll just see how high the case count gets and how nervous some people get.”

Consumer confidence rose in July to the highest level since February 2020, according to the Conference Board. The increase in confidence suggests consumers are positioned to continue driving economic growth this year...

Seems like good news to me.

Still more.

 

Baldwin Hills' Crenshaw Mall is Busted

It's a "black" mall, I guess. Nice part of town too. 

Who knows? It's probably just the bad economy and consumer trends away from brick-and-mortar. But someone, somewhere, will make this about racism, amirite? 

At LAT, "‘This mall has been devastated.’ A lean Christmas, empty stores and an unsettling future":

The food court is mostly shuttered. The Museum of African American Art, located improbably inside a Macy’s, is closed for now. And Black Santa is not coming to town.

The Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza may be open, but it doesn’t much feel that way.

Gone is the classic mall background noise — Top 40 music drowned out by people talking, walking, rustling shopping bags. Gone are the free weekly workouts and the book readings. The stores have signs in the windows noting that they are open with limited capacity, but more often than not there’s only a lone shopkeeper inside.

A few determined shoppers remain.

“I could have gone to Fox Hills mall but I said I’m coming here to Crenshaw, and I want to patronize it because it is struggling to come back,” said Yvette Archie, a 60-year-old veterinarian who visited the mall recently to do some Christmas shopping. “I’m hoping that we can keep it in our community and for our community.”

For decades, the Crenshaw mall has been a gathering place for Black Los Angeles and a prime venue for small businesses. Even during the pandemic, the mall has continued to serve the community with food drives and a coronavirus testing site. The mall also holds a weekly farmers market and Melanin Market LA, a showcase for small Black-owned businesses, in its parking lot.

But like its counterparts across the country, the mall has been pushed to the brink by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the holiday shopping season — when big and small businesses alike depend on a boost in sales to help pad margins in the new year — has coincided with the worst surge in COVID-19 cases of the pandemic.

Health and government officials have urged people to stay at home but stopped short of closing malls as they had done earlier in the pandemic. Recent orders from the Los Angeles County health department limited indoor mall capacity to 20% and prohibited dining on site...

More.

 

Customer Claims Otay Ranch ARCO Double Charged (VIDEO)

What a total scam. I don't doubt this for a minute.

At ABC 10 News San Diego:

Belgians Have a Term for People Who Drink Stella Artois — Tourists

I first tried Stella Artois this summer at my sister's. At first I thought it was a light beer, but it's not. I was impressed. It tastes good and goes down smooth. When I visited my mom's over Labor Day weekend my sister was there as well, and again we had Stella Artois. I haven't bought any since, but I like it.

So, now I'm getting a kick out of this piece at the Wall Street Journal. It turns out Stella's a tourist's beer. Belgium locals don't drink it:

BRUSSELS — Michel Sabourin, a 75-year-old bar owner, spends most days here tucked between his counter and a 5-foot pink neon sign touting “Stella Artois,” Belgium’s best-sold beer world-wide.

Don’t ask him for a Stella, though. He stopped selling it months ago. “I had to give up,” he said. “I didn’t have enough demand anymore.”

Stella is ubiquitous in bars and restaurants abroad, where it is increasingly seen as one of the most distinctively Belgian products. In the country of its birth, the pilsner has gone flat.

Laurent Van Der Meeren, manager of La Bécasse, a bar and restaurant in a southeastern Brussels residential neighborhood, stopped selling Stella in 2014. He replaced it with Jupiler—a pilsner owned, as is Stella, by Anheuser-Busch InBev NV—which he said is more popular with younger people. “I think it’s a generational thing,” he said.

“Herbaceous, with a metallically bitter finish” is how Michael Vermeren describes Stella. The southern-Belgium chef and zythologist, as beer sommeliers like to call themselves, said it is the last of Belgium’s mass-produced pilsners he would choose.

“Industrial beer isn’t really my thing,” he said. “Stella is an everyman beer and its taste is designed to be liked by everyone.”

At home, Stella had a 6.5% market share last year, far behind Jupiler’s 35%, according to market-research firm Euromonitor International.

On the bright side, “it’s still the No. 3 lager in Belgium,” said Todd Allen, vice president for Stella, which AB InBev said also trails Heineken NV’s Maes Pils...

More.

Apple's New Headphones Aren't Better

I wouldn't know. I haven't gotten my hands on any of these yet, heh.

The whole new iPhone 7, with the wireless headset, is supposed to be an industry game-changer.

But see Popular Mechanics, "Apple's AirPod Headphones Are an Awful Design." (Via Instapundit.)

Apple Unveils the iPhone 7

Following-up, "PLAY X STORE Wireless Bluetooth Earhook Earbuds."

Wireless really is the wave!

At LAT, "Farewell, headphone jack. Apple is killing you, but we'll never forget the decades we shared":

Apple made the first move to retire the audio jack on Wednesday, announcing that it will eliminate the jack from its flagship iPhone 7 smartphones.

When the device ships Sept. 16, it will come with a pair of wired earphones that plug into Apple’s proprietary charging port and an adapter that works with 3.5-mm plugs. The company also announced a pair of wireless earbuds called AirPods, priced at $159. Beats, the headphone maker that Apple acquired in 2014 for $3 billion, will offer its own range of wireless headphones.

The jack won’t disappear from electronics overnight, according to tech experts, who said decades of being the standard consumer audio jack has made the 3.5-mm port and its earphones pervasive.

“[But] this is a very big deal,” said Vince Ponzo, senior director of the entrepreneurship program at Columbia Business School. “When the world’s largest phone distributor and seller eliminates that piece of technology from its phones, it’s a big step toward doing away with that technology entirely.”

And that’s not hyperbole, because when Apple moves, the industry typically follows. The company was one of the first to get rid of serial ports on computers and move to USB ports. It got rid of ethernet ports on laptops, forcing customers to use wireless Internet. It got rid of floppy disks and CD and DVD players. And it all but got rid of buttons from cellphones. These are now the norm. With the iPhone 7, a wireless music listening experience could become the new normal.

Apple executive Phil Schiller said the decision to ditch the port “comes down to courage” — a statement that drew snickers from the crowd gathered at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on Wednesday for the unveiling of the iPhone 7. He called the single-purpose technology “ancient,” taking up valuable real estate on an already compact device, and he spelled out hopes for a “wireless future.”

The new iPhone replaces the jack with another speaker, making the gadget twice as loud and allowing users to blast music for the first time in stereo.

The move will no doubt frustrate many customers who currently use wired headphones from third-party headset makers, or those whose junk drawers are filled with tangled earbuds for use when the current pair vanishes.

If Apple’s shift makes wireless earbuds commonplace, it will be a change mourned by those prone to losing things (imagine the frustration of digging through a purse to find only a single earbud). It will also irk anyone who doesn’t want to charge another device at the end of the day (Apple’s AirPods will run for five hours per charge.)

But the loss of the 3.5-mm jack won’t be felt for long, said Simon Hall, the head of music technology at the Birmingham Conservatoire, who said consumers will adapt.

“It’s going to be a change, but eventually it may be viewed as a storm in a teacup,” he said...

Keep reading.

Violent Black Friday Shopping: Walmart 'Riot' (VIDEO)

I suppose I should update my last post at bit, here, "Black Friday Has Lost Its Edge."

Turns out Black Friday's been pretty violent so far, especially at Walmart. See the Syracuse Post-Standard, "Black Friday 2015 fights: Videos show Kentucky mall brawl, Walmart 'riot,' more." And at that link, "People Riot Over Black Friday Sales at Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas."

Black Friday Has Lost Its Edge

Well, it hasn't completely lost its edge, what, with all the Black Friday brawls.

But with fewer outlets participating in the super-duper early-bird crush of pre-dawn sales, it's getting to be less of a thing.

At the New York Times, "Black Friday Falters as Consumer Behaviors Change":

In 1939, the nation’s largest retailers sent Franklin D. Roosevelt an urgent plea. Thanksgiving fell on the last day of November that year, giving merchants too few days before Christmas to unleash the season’s sales.

The holiday might be a time-honored tradition, but wouldn’t Mr. Roosevelt consider moving the day up by a week?

The president’s acquiescence to retailers helped cement the pre-eminence of the post-Thanksgiving sales rush, now known as Black Friday. The day became an annual ritual, a family affair — a shopping orgy that delivered big profits for retailers, as well as a lift to the entire economy.

Seven decades later, Black Friday has lost its distinctive edge. Tens of millions of Americans will still hit the malls this Friday. But the relentless race for holiday dollars has blunted the day’s oomph, as stores offer deep discounts weeks before Thanksgiving and year-round deals in stores and online are causing sales fatigue. Some fed-up shoppers cheered this year when the outdoors retailer, REI, declared it was opting out of Black Friday sales altogether.

On the eve of yet another Thanksgiving weekend, retail experts and economists are asking the question: Is Black Friday over?

“It definitely matters so much less than it’s mattered in the past,” said John J. Canally, chief economic strategist at LPL Research. “The last couple of years, ‘Black Friday disappoints’ has been the usual story.”

But contrary to doom-and-gloom predictions this holiday season, dwindling sales for the long Thanksgiving weekend (which now begins Thursday afternoon) do not necessarily signal a cautious consumer. Americans are generally spending just as much of their hard-earned dollars as in the past.

Overall consumer spending since the beginning of 2014 has risen at a rate of 3 percent after lackluster gains in 2012 and 2013, and most stores achieve decent profits, on an earnings per share basis, during their holiday quarter.

The decline of Black Friday instead points to a shift in the way consumers spend their money.

“They’re online,” Mr. Canally said. “And they’re spending more on experiences. A day at the spa, a baseball game, the ballet — rather than a sweater or a pair of socks that no one wants.”

As a result, retailers rang up $51 billion on the day after Thanksgiving last year, down from a peak of almost $60 billion in 2012, according to the San Diego-based private equity firm LPL Research, which crunched data from the National Retail Federation and comScore...

More.

Let's Be Honest About Extravagant Consumption

I've had my share of extravagant consumption, and I'm looking forward to some more of it. YOLO.

At the Guardian UK, "Cyber heirs who flaunt their wealth online could be a boon."

Of course the Guardian's agenda is to further inflame class warfare, hence the cheers for greater transparency of ostentatious wealth. And I'll bet there's more admiration for it than the lefties like to admit. Frankly, wealthy leftists wallow in ugly guilt. Get over it and be proud of what you've earned. It could certainly be worse.