Retail feels the squeeze

“I don’t know how people are surviving,” said Deb Weigel, a manager of a parcel shop in Pembina, North Dakota, a town of 500 that used to rely on Canadian customers picking up packages they couldn’t ship north of the border. Her business now sees fewer than half the packages it once did. That is one of the more visceral signs of economic strain in this Friday roundup from Marketplace, which weaves together inflation data, consumer spending, the bond market’s anxiety about a new Fed chair, the AI takeover of Etsy, and the surprising longevity of Candy Crush.

Inflation data looks backward; energy markets look forward

The August CPI report showed core inflation at 2.5 percent — still above the Fed’s target, but heading in the right direction. But as Courtney Brown of Axios pointed out, that data is already stale. “Events are moving so quickly these days that a month is a lot,” she said. Since the July data was collected, the Middle East conflict has revved up again, pushing energy markets higher. That could mean “payback” in August: inflation that looks “not so cool.” The problem is what Stacey Vanick Smith of Bloomberg called the “last mile problem” for the Fed: getting inflation down from 3 percent to 2 percent is much harder than the initial drop from 9.1 percent to 3 percent. The easy wins are gone. What remains is sticky expectations — the restaurant owner who prints me