Here are the monster retailers that sell all the stuff that people simply couldn’t live without.

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
Here are the monster retailers that sell all the stuff that people simply couldn’t live without.

This morning’s key economic report was retail, and it was a bit of a whiplash for futures. The core retail month over month figure was expected to be +0.2% but was instead -0.1%. They also had to update the prior month’s figure lower since it was, ya know, totally made up out of whole cloth.

Oh, my Lord. Look at BIG LOTS! Just a catastrophe.

I’m not going to grab this red-hot skillet handle, but for the bolder among you, Costco (COST) has a P/E of 55 (remember, this isn’t a biotech company — they sell industrial-sized jars of mayonnaise) and, looking at the lifetime chart, seems, ummm, richly-valued.

If there’s one thing you can count on from ‘Mericuh, it’s the endless consumption of stuff. That is playing out beautifully, decade after decade, by way of the big box retailers. There was a time when a company selling gallon jugs of mayonnaise and 1000-packs of Ibuprofen would have merited a P/E ratio of 5, instead of 51, but these are not normal times. Lifetime highs, everywhere you look:
