Retail sales shows a leveling off, with danger of a double-dip

I think we are starting to see more examples of the economy leveling out to its new baseline with August's figures. This includes the US's retail sales numbers, which showed decent growth, but also growth that was declining from previous months.

Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for August 2020, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $537.5 billion, an increase of 0.6percent (± 0.5 percent) from the previous month, and 2.6 percent (± 0.7 percent) above August 2019. Total sales for the June 2020 through August 2020 period were up 2.4 percent (± 0.5 percent) from the same period a year ago. The June 2020 to July 2020 percent change was revised from up 1.2 percent (± 0.5percent) to up 0.9 percent (± 0.2 percent).

On the positive side, retail sales in the US are actually higher than they were before COVID-19 broke out. But you can see the flattening over the last 2 months.

But even though the total sales are what you might have expected 6 months ago, the COVID era has caused a major change in where people are spending their money. Some retailers have benefitted from having more people staying at home, including non-store retailers like Amazon.com, along with grocery stores and home/garden stores. Those places had big gains starting in March, and have held most of those gains in the months after that.

Conversely, money spent on going out continues to be depressed, and brick-and-mortar retail that relies on in-store purchases is floundering. These sectors have not seen many of their jobs come back, and I can't see it getting much better as the weather turns colder while COVID continues to fester.

Instead of a short-term adjustment to a lockdown, these changes are now becoming structural. And unless there is a significant bailout for these sectors coming, many of these businesses are going to go under in the coming weeks and months, with little to replace them.

And once those businesses and jobs go away this Winter due to the lack of demand, that likely will make retail sales decline again, unless there is some kind of assistance coming from DC to allow the typical American to keep spending somewhere. We would then go from the K-shaped "recovery" that we've been seeing back to a full-fledged double-dip recession that starts from an already-weakened economy, and whoever is president and in Congress in 2021 will be walking into a mess.