The 0.6% That Means We Still Eat Dinner

I was standing in the kitchen attempting to decide whether the small amount of coffee left in the pot constituted "more coffee" or simply "a sad puddle I should pour out and pretend never existed," when I saw the headline. Retail sales up 0.5% in April. I read it the way I read most economic news, which is to say with the dim awareness that someone, somewhere, has measured me and found me to be a decimal.

The Associated Press, via The Seattle Times, informed me Thursday that the Commerce Department had released its numbers, and that shoppers — me, presumably, although I do not feel like a shopper so much as a person who occasionally panics into a Target — had pulled back in April. The 0.5% rise was a slowdown from a revised 1.6% in March, which was apparently the largest one-month jump in more than three years, mostly because gas prices had spiked rapidly due to the Iran war. Excluding gas, the April number was 0.3%. Department stores fell 3.2%. Furniture and home furnishings slipped 2%. Online sales rose 1.1%. Restaurants ticked up 0.6%.

I read these numbers the way I read a former roommate's wedding registry: with the queasy sense that I was being told something about my own life that I had not consented to know. A 3.2% drop at department stores is not a statistic. It is a woman in Tukwila putting a candle back on the shelf because the gas to get home cost what the candle cost. It is me last Tuesday, standing in front of a $14 jar of olives and conducting an internal trial in which I was both the prosecution and the defense and also, somehow, the olives.

What I cannot stop thinking about is the restaurants. A 0.6% increase. People still went out. People still sat down across from another person and ordered something, even with the pump glowing its little red total like an accusation, even with a war happening somewhere they will never see, fought over a substance currently making their Honda Civic too expensive to drive to their mother's house. That tiny stubborn number, 0.6%, feels to me like the entire human project. We will eat dinner. We will eat dinner during anything. We have eaten dinner during everything.

And the furniture, falling 2%, which means somewhere a couch did not get bought, and someone is sitting on the old couch, the one with the stain, deciding it is fine, it is fine, it is fine, the couch is fine, the year is fine, the war is far away, the gas will come down, the couch is honestly fine.

I poured the sad puddle into my cup. I drank it. It was, in the technical sense, coffee. It was, in every other sense, a decision I had made because the alternative was making a new decision, and I had reached, for the day, my limit.

Source: The Seattle Times — Business