This August retail sales in the U.S. rose .9%, slightly ahead of economist's estimates. Digging into the numbers a bit reveals that the gain was driven by auto demand, and higher gas prices. Stripping these figures out and retail sales sans automobiles were less than what economists expected.
There are a couple of ways to slice this data and play current spending habits, but one thing we are seeing is that consumers are increasingly putting their dollars where they are going the furthest, and that means investors should keep a keen eye on known value offerings, like Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), and Dollar General (NYSE: DG).
