Marketplace - Consumer confidence slides to 12-year low

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Consumer confidence fell to a 12-year low in September, according to The Conference Board. The index has been trending down for a couple years, but this latest decline was steep. One reason? Upper-middle class respondents are starting to feel the pressure, too. Also in this episode: The economic forces behind GDP growth might run out of steam soon, the low-hire low-fire labor market marches on, and high diesel prices keep some Gulf shrimpers on dry land.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.Read the stories in today’s episode:How long can the economy keep growing?The latest JOLTS survey shows more of the same low-hire, low-fire economyConsumer confidence falls to its lowest level in 12 years, survey showsThe price tag might be an endangered speciesHigh diesel prices force some Gulf shrimpers to stay dockedNew career path, new baby, no problem

If not jobs and if not bonds, then what? From American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Risdahl. It is Tuesday, today, 29 September. Good as it always is, to have you along, everybody. I know, I know. I said yesterday the big through line this week was the labor market.

Well, that and bonds, but we are going to get. bonds a break today. And we are going to get to the labor market, but we are going to start instead with a different A-list economic indicator, gross domestic product. Tomorrow morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis is going to tell us how much the economy grew in the second quarter. This will be the Bureau's third and final estimate of that number. It already reported the economy grew at an annualized rate of 1.5 percent April through June. So we are just going to get ahead of the news and have a look at what we know about how much the economy is growing right now. Marketplace is Justin Ho gets us going.

GDP is a measure of how much output the economy is producing, and the BEA tallies it by looking at who's buying all that output. So is it consumers? You've got consumer spending. Is it businesses doing investments? That's investment spending. That's David Kelly with JP Morgan Asset Management. GDP also includes government spending and net exports.

But Kelly says the first part of that list, consumer spending has been resilient lately, partly because of the bigger tax refunds people got this year. And then there's also just this wealth effect. We're just coming up in the fourth year anniversary of a massive bull market in stocks, and that has generated a lot of wealth, making for a very resilient consumer. Then there's investment spending. Bernard Yeros, with Oxford economics, says businesses have been investing a lot in inventories. When you look at a lot of the survey data, businesses are saying that their inventories are quite low. which means that they need to restock. Eero says there's also been plenty of investment in AI,

spending on data centers and all of the equipment that goes into them. But he says a lot of that spending is boosting GDP more in Taiwan and Korea and other countries that make that equipment. I just think we have to be careful not to overstate the benefits to growth in the economy because a lot of the AI spending by businesses is imported from abroad. A lot of the factors that are powering growth right now also might not last. Matthew Miskin, with Manuife John Hancock investments, says consumers might not keep spending the way they have been. The tax cuts are going to be hard to replicate.

Consumers are dealing with higher oil prices and higher mortgage rates at the same time. And consumer spending depends on a strong labor market. Miskin says for GDP to keep growing at a steady pace. I think you need to see broadening the job gains. I think you need people that are moving up the job corporate ladder. I think that's really hard right now still. Iskin says he expects GDP to pick up in the third quarter and slow down in the fourth. I'm Justin Howe for Marketplace.

Okay, as promised, and as the end of Justin's piece there sort of alluded to, the labor market, about which we got the first of the week's big reports this morning. The job openings and labor turnover survey say, with me now, jolts. It was pretty steady, low hire, low fire, if you will. The number of people hired last month was, up just a touch. The number of people who quit their jobs or were laid off was pretty much flat. Marketplace's Stephanie Hughes has more. There are optimistic words to describe hiring right now, like stable, and more pessimistic ones,

like stuck. Economist Leah Brooks' description is somewhere in the middle. I characterize it as me. Brooks, who's with George Washington University, says the reason hiring isn't budging is that businesses are afraid to budge. I think if I'm a business, I want to hire somebody. new if somebody leaves or if I have the expectation of being able to sell more. But people aren't really leaving their jobs right now. And before businesses amp up to sell more, they want to be certain there's going to be demand. And I don't think there's a lot of certainty in the U.S. market right now. You can blame the usual suspects for that. Tariffs, geopolitical uncertainty,

whatever happens with AI. Now there's a new factor. The Fed just raised interest rates for the first time in three years. ZipRecruiter labor economist Nicole Bischot, points out more are expected. As we see these employers facing these higher rates, that makes it more difficult to borrow capital, to expand their business, and to hire more people. Which is leaving job seekers in the lurch. Unemployment is becoming a lot more of a sticky issue in this market, meaning if you find yourself unemployed, it might take six plus months to find something. Another complicating factor, says George Washington's Leah Brooks, interest rates on government debt are pretty high right now. So investors might be more inclined to put their money into low-risk government bonds,

then lend it to a higher-risk new business. And it just sucks money out of the productive private investment part of the economy. Which means less money for businesses who are then more likely to feel meh about hiring. I'm Stephanie Hughes from Marketplace. Wall Street on this Tuesday, I know I said we were giving bonds a break, but do not sleep on those rising yields. Equity traders, we're kind of blah. Today, we will have the details when we do the numbers.

Here's one from the Marketplace Desk of Lather, Rinse, Repeat. We got fresh data today on how consumers are feeling. And as we have been telling you all summer, we ain't feeling great. The conference board shows consumer confidence fell in September, fell again, I should say, to the lowest level in more than 12 years. Consumers are less optimistic across the board about the current economy and the future economy and household finances and the labor market. Marketplace of Kelly Wells has more on how all those worsening vibes could affect actual behavior. As any economist will tell you, Yelena Shulet Yevo with the conference board says one month of data could be an anomaly and should be taken with a grain of salt.

But the problem is that it's not just one month of data. Confidence has been trending downward for years. This month, it just fell more sharply. Consumers are really worried. They are planning to spend less, particularly on discretionary items. Consumers have been saying they plan to spend less for a while, and yet, spending remains defiantly resilient. Jonathan Ernest is an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University. He says that continued spending is less good than it sounds.

We've seen savings rates drop where people aren't putting away as much for future rainy days. They're kind of treating this like the rainy day. Ernest says that's because the cost of necessities keeps going up. We're spending more on gas and food, not because we can, but because we have to eat and get to work. You know, I have young kids who I'm, you know, paying for schooling and care, and I'm also buying lots of groceries and chicken nuggets and things like that. Then there's the new trend that economics professor Paul Shea of Bates College says raises some eyebrows. The upper middle class, or household incomes in the $125,000 to $150,000 range, saw the sharpest decline in confidence.

So far, the deterioration in consumer confidence has been concentrated among low-to-middle-income households. Which is why consumer spending has stayed resilient. Spending from wealthier families has masked cuts from lower-income families. And so if this is a sign that the higher-income households who account for more of the consumption, of course, are starting to lose a little bit of faith, could be a real red flag going forward. Shea says he's waiting to see whether the jobs market data on Friday spells more bad news before he gets too worried. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.

Kristen Schwab did a story for us back in January about what euphemistically come to be called personalized pricing. She and her husband stood on the same street corner, opened to their Uber apps at the same time, asked for the exact same ride for which Kristen was charged a buck more than her husband was. A buck is just a buck, and of course you do have to take the cheaper ride, but you extrapolate that experience across the trillions of transactions that happen across this economy, and pretty soon you are talking real money. It's also a really good, if disconcerting example of how companies are leveraging what they know about us to set individually specific prices.

That gets me to a book out today from Lindsay Owen. She's the president and the CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative. That's a progressive think tank. And the title of her book is Gouged, the end of a fair price and what it means for your wallet. Lindsay, it's good to have you on. Thanks so much for having me, Kai. Can we get to the subtitle of this book first? The idea of a fair price. What does that actually mean?

Because I always thought a fair price was what you were willing to pay. I think a fair price is a posted price. A fair price is a predictable price. And a fair price is a price that is set based on the product and not you, the consumer. And therein is the crux of this book. because what is happening, as you point out, is that companies are increasingly using the data that they have on us, all kinds of data,

to change the prices, basically, depending on who you are. Yeah, it's very retro. You know, thousands of years ago, we went to the souk, and the merchant set a price based on what he thought we might be willing to fork over. If we had a nice tunic on,

we probably paid a little more. But about 150 years ago in this country, we dispensed with haggling, It was the Quakers who said, ah, the Puritans are kind of greedy. I don't really like what they're up to. And then it was John Wanamaker in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who said, you know, I'm going to stick a price tag on my items in my store, both because he was inspired by this, but also he was a businessman,

and it's a little time-consuming to haggle for every item in your cart. But right now I think the price tag is a bit of an endangered species, and companies are now increasingly collecting data on us to get a better sense of how much they think they can get away with charging us as individuals. You all did an experiment, you and consumer reports, I guess, did an experiment involving Instacart. Tell us about that, would you? Yeah, Groundwork teamed up with more perfect union and consumer reports, and we ran an experiment that exposed a massive experiment that Instacart was running on millions of Americans while they shopped for groceries. We recruited

400 secret shoppers, pick the same pickup location, a Safeway grocery store in Seattle, Washington, pick up the same basket of groceries. For about 75% of items in that basket of groceries, different people in the experiment were offered different prices across all of the baskets in the study, about a 7% variation. So we took Instacart's own estimate of how much a household of four spends on groceries in a year and calculated that it could be as much as $1,200 the result of this sort of Instacart experiment tax for shoppers. Okay, so look, on the face of it and speaking as a consumer, that's outrageous. But speaking as a person who runs a business or a large company, why is that bad?

Yeah, there were definitely, you know, critics of the study who said, look, there's nothing to see here. This is classic A-B testing. But I don't think most Americans, when they shop for groceries, realize that they are guinea pigs so that the company can calibrate exactly how much they can get away with charging you. I think this is ultimately why, you know, within two weeks of releasing our study, Instacart reversed course, effectively promising to shut down the lab. But this was a big part of Instacart's business model. They acquired the AI pricing giant Eversight in 2021,

and Eversight promise to help companies run these pricing experiments without consumers' knowledge. This was a big part of what they sold retailers. When you, Lindsay Owens, are out in this economy as a consumer, what do you do to keep yourself on guard, as it were? Because it's got to be exhausting. Yeah, I mean, I run a think tank, but I'm also a shopper. I'm also a consumer. I'm the mom of a toddler.

I'm tired. I don't want to spend my evenings comparison shopping online. The truth is, from the bottom of my heart, I do not believe it should be every consumer's job to duck and dodge and bob and weave. The budget shopper is the mechanism by which prices are disciplined in this economy. And when the budget shopper can't do their work

because they can't comparison shop or because they're being picked off by a company who knows they need a good deal, that undermines healthy competition in the market writ large. It's a book called Gouged by Lindsay Owens. She runs the Groundwork Collaborative in Washington. Lindsay, thanks a bunch. I appreciate your time. Thanks so much for having me.

Coming up. Everything hit us at wines. When it rains, it does kind of pour, you know. First, though, let's do the numbers. Down Dustals down 131 points. That's a quarter percent, 51,349. The NASDAQ down 22 points. That's about a 10% 26,079 or 7.

S&P 500 gave back 12 points, about 210%, 76 and 70. Withering consumer confidence has not stopped some of us from spending money on travel. Cruise operator Carnival raised its annual forecast today, saying 2027 is already half booked. 2028 bookings off to a, quote, excellent start. Shares in Carnival Corporation up 13 and 4 tenths percent on the day. Royal Caribbean up 7 and 4 tenths percent. On the front page of the New York Times 110 years ago, John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil. He was crowned a billionaire of the world's first, in fact, five years after the government took apart his monopoly.

Parts of Standard Oil eventually became ExxonMobil and Chevron. ExxonMobil down 7 tenths percent on the day. Chevron gave up nine tenths of one percent. Bond prices went down when that happens. The yield goes up. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 5.24 percent, the 30-year at 5.56. percent. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdal.

It's more likely than not that when you head toward the back of your local piggly-wiggly toward the freezers and you reach in to grab a bag of shrimp, it's odds on that you're not thinking, A, about where that shrimp comes from, and B, and related what that says about the state of the Gulf Coast shripping industry. Oh, also, and not for nothing, throw the price of a gallon a diesel into your considerations too. Marketplace's Elizabeth Trouval has our story. A large white and blue fishing boat is docked here at the Brownsville Fishing Harbor on the Gulf where Texas meets Mexico. But local fishermen aren't preparing to go fish. They're just sitting around. I ask one of them, Juan Mendez. Why?

Shrum prices are low, he says, while diesel prices. are high. It's just not profitable to take the boat out to fish shrimp that are only going for $4 or so a pound, he tells me. So I ask, how many times he's been out fishing so far this season? Just one time, he says. Mendez lives in Nicaragua, but Shrimp's here on a visa. He's done it for nearly a decade. But now he says, shrimpers like him are thinking about going back home. There's no money. here. Near the docks is Texas Gulf trawling, a shirming company here in Brownsville with 14 boats. Most are just sitting around, says manager Greg Laundry. And the boats that are out to sea? They're working on old fuel because we just can't afford the diesel price. The current diesel price

coinciding with the current price of shrimp. He says diesel. Diesel is the single largest expense to the boat. Filling up once could cost around $85,000. But conditions were tough even before diesel prices went up roughly 70% because of the war in Iran and attacks on Russian refineries. It's a longstanding problem and it's just getting worse. That's Christopher Leza, an economist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He says even though Americans eat a ton of shrimp, most. Most of it is imported for cheap from abroad.

95% of the shrimp consumed is imported. And the other is, you know, 5% is local caught. It's a bad year for an industry that's been shrinking. When a crisis hits and fuel prices go up or the shrimp price collapses, then that's when people actually have to leave the industry, right? They just can't keep going. But third-generation shriekimer Kyle Kimball is still bringing home some catches this season. He's based in Port Arthur, where Texas meets Louisiana.

I worked with my grandfather when I was like five, and I can remember picking and driving and everything. He loves it out on the water. He's had his own vessel for about 45 years. He's been able to shrimp some this season because his boat uses less diesel per hour than a lot of other shrimpers. I'm one of the cheapest boats to operate at 11 gallons an hour. But that's still $65 in a hour. hour or so for just fuel. High diesel prices only add to his worries about the future of the Gulf shrimp industry

that's shrinking and aging. Young man don't have a chance. His wife, Trisha Kimball with the Port Arthur Area Shrimpers Association, says it's hard to recruit young people into an industry and decline. They're just not going to do that if you're making negative money. You know, that's not a real enticement. But for now, Kyle, who's in. in his 60s is hanging on.

The wearing tear from 63 on up is really bad. But I don't know. It gets in your blood. It's hard to explain that you can't just quit. He loves his job, he says. Diesel and shrimp prices be damned. He's just not ready to give it up. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace.

Here's a labor market term we haven't heard in a little while. The Great Resignation back five years ago, just after the peak of the pandemic, when people were quitting their jobs right and left, confident that there would be something else out there for them. That brings me to today's installment of our series, clocked out. I'm Samantha Affordy. I'm based in Lake Charles, Louisiana. At 32 years old, I left my career and decided to go back to school for architecture.

You know, I worked in project management and with creatives for 10 years and had a pretty good career. I would say I was good at what I did, but I wasn't super excited about going to work every day. I was kind of jealous of the creatives that I was managing their projects. There was a six-week period where everything hit us at one. I got accepted to graduate school for architecture. I found out I was pregnant. And then I quit the job I had been at for six years. You know, my husband makes enough to support our household.

So we're very lucky to be in that situation. But adding a baby, daycare, and just like the general increase in the cost of living, cost of groceries, and everything else, it has made the fact that I'm not earning an income feel a lot more tangible. I do get frustrated sometimes. I want to go out to dinner. I want to take the vacation. I want to feel like we have disposable income again. But I have to remind myself that this is all a short-term sacrifice for my future self. I'm also trying to figure out if I want to get a part-time job. and go to school, it means it would probably take me longer to finish my degree, but I am trying to weigh the pros and cons of that decision. I am really enjoying school.

I'm really enjoying what I'm learning. It's been really validating. Like, I feel like I'm on the right path and that I'm making the right choice right now. And, like, honestly, becoming a mom, too, has made this even more meaningful. I hope it's something she learns from watching me and you don't have to have everything figured out. You don't have to take the easiest path. Sometimes you have to be resilient,

make sacrifices, and be willing to change direction, even if that's scary, to build the life that you want. You definitely do not need to have everything figured out. Not at all. Samantha Rafferty, Lake Charles, Louisiana. If you've got a story of being out of the labor, force or maybe about trying to get back in? Tell us about it, would you?

Marketplace.org slash clocked out. This final note on the way out today in which, you know, sometimes it really does pay to read the fine print in those corporate regulatory filings. Anthropic is planning to go public later this year. I think you knew that it will be the first of the pure play artificial intelligence companies to do so. It's looking for evaluation somewhere around $2 trillion. but I am burying the lead. Reuters reported this morning that Anthropics

IPO prospectus, which Reuters says it has seen, warns that its AI models pose, and this is a quote, catastrophic or existential risks to humanity. Now, as always, consult your own financial advisor, but I don't know. I think that's quite a thing to say about the technology

that you want people to invest in. No? Right? I mean, what do you even say? Anyway, got to go. Jordan Manjee Zanayal Maharaj, Janet Wynn, Olga Oxman, and Virginia K. Smith are the digital team. I'm Kai Rizdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

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