Title:
Holiday Season Brought Brighter Time for Stores
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Economics Report.
See text below
Text:
The season for buying Christmas gifts was the
busiest time for most stores and online retailers in
the United States. Final numbers for the holiday
season including after-Christmas sales will not be
known for a while. But a report on retail sales in
November suggested that economic growth may be
gaining speed. The Commerce Department said sales
increased for the fifth month in a row. They grew by
eight-tenths of one percent over October. But the
report came the same day the central bank said the
economy is not growing fast enough to reduce
unemployment. The jobless rate is nearly ten
percent. So, policy makers at the Federal Reserve
voted to continue a program of buying government
bonds. That program, launched in November, could
inject six hundred billion dollars into the economy.
The aim is to increase economic growth by lowering
long-term interest rates. That would reduce
borrowing costs for businesses and individuals. But
long-term rates have risen since the Fed launched
its latest program of so-called quantitative easing,
known as "QE2." One way to get a sense of how
Americans feel about the economy is through retail
sales. Consumer demand drives about seventy percent
of the nation's economic activity. The National
Retail Federation says its members employ
twenty-five million people in the retail and
services industry. Those businesses reported almost
two and a half trillion dollars in sales in two
thousand nine. Terry Lundgren is chief executive of
Macy's, the company that owns Macy's and
Bloomingdales department stores. He said: "Retail
and restaurants represent one in five jobs in
America. So if we do well then we're going to be the
ones that will start to lead us into a recovery."
The kinds of stores where sales are up also says
something about the economy. Stores with the lowest
prices do well in hard economic times. But the
retail federation said at the end of November that
discounters had fewer shoppers this year. Stores
that sell jewelry and other higher-priced items have
seen sales grow. Another change: Americans are less
willing to buy on credit. Over forty percent of
holiday shoppers said they planned to mainly use
debit cards instead of credit cards. Instead of
borrowing money, debit cards take money directly
from a bank account. For VOA Special English, I'm
Alex Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
