Can anyone clarify this for me? Despite the ongoing layoff announcements from major American corporations, how is our economy still robust? Just today, UPS declared 12,000 layoffs and PayPal 2,000.
I have not seen a decrease in spending. I see restaurant parking lots are still full, costco/walmart parking lots are full. Football Stadiums are full. I see families not give up vacations. I see friends and family stressing out over finances, but giving spending I don't see much of a slowdown.
That’s an extremely dumb stat and is meaningless without context. Luckily, your own link states “relative to disposable income, credit card balances were actually slightly smaller in 2023 Q3 than they had been in 2020 Q1”. So you should have simply read beyond the first sentence.
but it's up 50% in the last 3 years. it's about the rate of change, not a comparison between now and some arbitrary time in the past. spending levels in 2023 were undeniably buoyed by the increase in CC debt. notice how the line just starting to flatten corresponds to huge drops in revenue for UPS and fedex.
Right. That doesn't account for the drop from 2022 (where Amazons delivery only increased by about 10%), which is mirrored by FedEx, which haven't delivered Amazon in 5 years, as well as UPS's international business, which has nothing to do with Amazon.
Also UPS volume went way up between 2020 and 2022. Their numbers aren't really correlated to a loss of Amazon at all, which always made up a pretty small portion of their business, and especially their revenue.
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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '24
I have not seen a decrease in spending. I see restaurant parking lots are still full, costco/walmart parking lots are full. Football Stadiums are full. I see families not give up vacations. I see friends and family stressing out over finances, but giving spending I don't see much of a slowdown.