Consumer spending is up but Las Vegas locals say they don’t see savings
Dr. Stephen Miller is a professor at UNLV and the top researcher for the school’s Center for Business and Economic Research. He says he’s not putting a lot of stock in the May consumer confidence index score.
“It’s no big deal, I don’t think,” Miller says. “The confidence index samples 3,000 people nationwide. It’s an attempt to measure what’s going to happen with consumer spending in the near future. At the center, we’re still pretty positive about the economy, but something to maybe be concerned about is the amount of credit card debt people are taking on in order to finance their consumer consumption activity.”
According to a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the percentage of credit card holders in the U.S. with delinquent debt continued to rise last quarter and now sits at about 10% of all cardholders.
Still, metrics have shown that grocery prices have retreated recently, though prices for many items remain high.
“It looks like grocery prices are going to be coming down,” Miller says. “The fast food industry is competing on a downward trajectory too.”