Wall Street’s recent beef with retail is artfully captured by lyrics in Hank Williams Jr.’s song “Country Boys Can Survive”: “The interest is up and the stock market’s down, and you only get mugged if you go downtown.”
Actually, all kinds of retailers are boosting sales by going downtown. Indeed, retail overall has had quite a good year thanks to rising employment and wages, and buoyant consumer confidence. Holiday sales have been robust, including Black Friday. Yet investors have grown touchy about the sector, sending several companies’ stocks down as their third quarter reports came in. As of Thursday, the Standard & Poor’s 500 was down 15.5% for the year, while the S&P retail index was down 21.6%.
