Jennifer Williams
speaker
37 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard Apr 2024
Jennifer Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
WSJ Your Money Briefing · Money Is Tight, but Americans Are Still Revenge Spending · 3 Apr 2024
podcast
They're finding that consumers are still willing to invest on a nice article of clothing, for instance, or to travel.
And so they're investing dollars to make sure that a garment is nice or that a hotel is available for a big event like the solar eclipse, for instance.
For others, like Conagra's CFO talked to me about what they call selective splurging, where shoppers are finding ways to offset spending on experiences and being out by making adjustments in the grocery store.
And so they are increasing their marketing spend to try to get consumers to shop their products again.
The CFOs that I spoke with have started to say that they are anticipating that the consumer will eventually pull back some on their discretionary spending, but they're not budgeting for that and they're not forecasting for that this year.
The importance of not having the surprise is that they can do exactly that, plan out the financials for the year, and it's better to be safe and assume that this will continue when you're planning for the fiscal year.
Restaurants and retailers have taken a lot of pricing over the last couple of years, and consumers haven't really balked at that.
CFOs are starting to see some price sensitivity and this notion that consumers may have hit their limit in terms of how much higher prices can go.
So this tension, I feel like, where companies are trying to figure out
Well, if people are pulling back or buying less and we can't raise prices anymore, what do we do to help the bottom line?
Some have written off the possibility of buying a new home with where mortgage rates are.
Some are no longer thinking about saving for retirement.
Embracing this, have an experience now and spend on that versus some of these more longer term, save for a rainy day type of savings.
There's a lot of looking for what the new normal will be.
They are seeing patterns that historically they wouldn't have expected to see.
Economists, too, have been surprised by the strength of the consumer.
And so it means that they're looking for where things will normalize and what the new normal might be.
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