Best Buy, the world's largest consumer-electronics retailer, yesterday cut its full-year earnings forecast. The Richfield, Minnesota-based chain also reported a 30 percent decline in second-quarter profit.
'Measured Choices'
"The consumer is making very measured choices," Chief Executive Officer Brian Dunn said in a telephone interview yesterday. "I don't think it's a year where someone is going to buy a TV and a tablet and a new smartphone and go to Disneyland."
Sales gains at Minneapolis-based Target, the second-largest U.S. discount retailer, are "a bit more challenging" than expected at the beginning of the year, Douglas Scovanner, chief financial officer, said at a Sept. 8 conference.
Plano, Texas-based J.C. Penney, like other retailers, is seeing less mall traffic and more cautious consumer spending on non-essential products, according to Chief Executive Officer Myron Ullman.
"Everybody wishes the economy were better, the job growth, real income growth and the things that drive the economy were more vibrant," he said in a Sept. 7 conference presentation. "The upper-income customer, with more exposure to the stock market, has been more enthusiastic about discretionary spending and the bottom quartile customer has had to make it work with high unemployment and gas prices and food prices."