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Over the past couple of years, there has been a somewhat confounding phenomenon going on with American consumers. They say the economy is terrible and are up in arms about inflation, but despite all that, many of them are spending their way through it. American shoppers will not be stopped — or, at least, they haven’t been stopped yet.

Consumers have largely been hanging in there, economically. Stimulus checks and savings built up during the pandemic have left them with extra cash they’ve been eager to spend. Retail sales seemed to slow at the end of 2022, but in January 2023, they rebounded once again. Despite the fact that many companies have increased prices in order to offset their own rising costs, they’ve also taken advantage of the inflationary moment to raise prices and increase their profit margins to their highest level in decades — if everybody knows everything’s getting more expensive, it’s easier to get them to go along with rising costs. Plenty of executives were quite open about what was going on.

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