Pressures on Lower-Income Consumers Signal Pain for Beauty and Apparel Merchants

T.S. Eliot wrote that the world would end not with a bang but a whimper.

It may be the case that the unstoppable wave of consumer spending may end that way too, and not with a full-fledged slamming on the brakes — a wallop that hits merchants all at once.

We may see a pulling back on the purse strings that accelerates as consumers find savings can’t sustain that spending while debt adds additional pressures.

And it may be the lower income consumers who offer the clearest indication of what’s to come for merchants...