Marketplace - Holiday spending slowdown

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

New data show retail sales were flat in December, despite high expectations for the holiday season. So did shoppers spend less? Or did they just frontload that gift spending in November? Also in this episode: AI tools propel widespread online shopping scams, a Colorado utility company shuts off power to prevent wildfires, and what’s next for crypto after last week’s freefall.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.

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Today on the show We'll talk about crypto, retail, AI scams and we'll talk about a company placing a bet on the idea

that it will outlive us All. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab in for Kyrisdahl. It's Tuesday, February 10th. Good to be here with you. Okay, humor me here. Grab your crystal ball. Can you tell me where the economy will be in one year? Yes? No. Then how about in 100 years? An impossible task, I know, because there's no way of understanding what economic policy will look like, how AI will shape our work, or even whether the companies we work for will still be here. Well, Alphabet is promising it will be around in a century, making tech products and services, and also making

interest payments on corporate debt. The parent company of Google is issuing tens of billions of dollars worth of bonds this week, including some in the UK with a 100-year maturity date. Marketplace's Daniel Ackerman looks into why Alphabet is going so long on its debt, and who would actually buy these bonds? Alphabet has plans to spend big, says Dan Ives, a tech analyst with Wed Bush securities, on big data centers. They're essentially building out new cities. It's like building Vegas from the desert in the 1950s.

And that is going to take a lot of cash over the course of many years. We're going to be building out data centers for a long time to come. Giluria is an analyst with D.A. Davidson. And he says Alphabet's sale of century-long bonds is something of a flex on its competitors in the AI race. They want to communicate to everybody else. We're in it for the long haul. This is a big old game of chicken. We are going to drive as fast as we can. I'm going to borrow for a hundred years because I'm that confident that I'm going to win. That's what Google is doing.

There are buyers interested in bonds that won't mature until 21. Jerald Cohen, an economist at the University of North Carolina, says some money managers think very far ahead. Insurance companies, pension companies have very long-dated liabilities. Alphabet had no problem finding buyers for its century bonds today, according to Bloomberg. But Cohen says it's hard to say how this will all work out for Alphabet or for bond investors. The last tech company to issue a 100-year bond was the cell phone maker Motorola.

That was in 1997, before the iPhone. The company still exists, although it doesn't exist in the same form as it did almost 30 years ago. Those Motorola bonds are trading on the secondary market for around 80 cents on the dollar. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. Wall Street today, a little up, a little down. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. We're still waiting for the Supreme Court ruling on the legality of the Trump administration's tariffs. The justices are scheduled to take the bench again next Friday, so we may get a

decision soon. We may not. The tariff picture has been muddy for about a year now. On again, off again, on again, repeat. And throughout it all, we've been keeping in touch with Daniela Velasquez de Leon. She is general manager at Organics Unlimited, a banana importer in San Diego. Danielle, it's great to talk to you again. Yeah, it's great to connect. Catch me up on bananas. How is business? Businesses is doing well ever since the full exemption on fresh produce that isn't produced domestically. That's given us some semblance of stability, though there's still a lot of uncertainty in the world right now. You just mentioned some worries you still have. Tell me more.

Well, on the one hand, it feels like tariffs are stable for now. But at the same time, there's still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the macroeconomic situation. I mean, something like the strength of the dollar really affects all of the products that were importing from abroad. So even though we don't have the tariffs, our cost of goods has gone up over 10% year, just with the strength of the dollar. So that's pretty similar to what we were feeling with the tariffs, but we're not able to increase prices by that much, especially on an item like bananas that's been artificially underpriced for decades. And then just the uncertainty around the upcoming renegotiation of the USMCA agreement is also something that has us a little nervous. Again, I really trust and hope that we'll continue to work together, you know, between the Canada, U.S. and Mexico, but there's just a lot of uncertainty right now.

You know, even if you're in a stable time, a more stable time right now than before, I'm kind of wondering what it's like to look back on the high stress period of maybe this past summer or earlier in the year and what that cost you insanity, but also what it actually cost your business. I mean, I guess on one hand, it's better, you know, that you're dealing with less tariff stress now, but at the same time, was it all for nothing, I guess I'm wondering. I mean, if we're getting philosophical, it helped me mentally to realize at some point you have to let go of the things you can't control. But it did cost us our business. I mean, I think I shared with you previously that we spent a lot of money with lawyers to try and understand what compliance would actually mean if the tariffs went into place. We also did end up paying tariffs for some time, and that was also a lot of money.

And then also just the cost of misinvestments. We had planned on a number of investments in 2025 that didn't end up materializing because we didn't know what was going to happen. Do you think you'll be moving ahead with some of those this year? Very slowly. I think we were very excited when 2025 started to get all of these projects underway. And what 2025 has taught us is that in this climate, we need to be slow and measured. So we do plan on making those investments, but it will be at a much slower pace as we understand what's going to be coming down the pipeline. How closely are you watching this Supreme Court ruling on the legality of these tariffs? I mean, I feel like it's been any day now, every day now. Yeah, I was following closely when the first deadline was approaching, and I have no doubt that when that decision comes out, I will hear about it all across our industry news that I do keep up with every day. But I've tried to stop following the news every single day like I used to just for my own mental sanity.

Fair enough. Danielle Velasquez-Daleone is General Manager at Organics Unlimited. Thanks for talking. Thank you. You may remember all those stories at the end of last year about how 2025 set another record for online holiday spending. Well, we just got a new snapshot of what happened. delayed because of last year's government shutdown. And it kind of contradicts the super spending narrative. The Census Bureau's report on December retail sales says they were flat, zero percent, basically unchanged from the month before.

So what's going on here? Marketplace's Carla Javier looked into it. Maybe expectations for December, based on past behavior and spending among high-income consumers, were just a little too high this time, says Katie Thomas at the Kearney Consumer Institute. What you see here is just a little bit of acknowledgement across the board, regardless of income, that people are making thoughtful purchases. So they were still spending, but they weren't overspending. Perhaps foregoing that extra dessert or gift. Uncertainty about jobs, tariffs, health care costs, and government shutdowns could have all taken a toll on spending too, says Olivia Johnson at the University of Houston.

We cannot negate the social and cultural and political turmoil that we've been seeing that ultimately impact consumers. Or maybe with retailers offering deals earlier and earlier, consumers looking to save some money might have already finished their holiday shopping before December even started. Rund Sundaram is with CFRA research. November was a stronger than expected month. Retail sales were up 0.6% from October to November. And so that sort of explained why maybe we saw some flat growth in December.

Retail sales data, Sundaram says, can be volatile, so he's not worried about any one month, though he will be watching as more retailers report their earnings over the next few days and weeks, in particular, looking at same-store sales, which give the clearest picture on how a retailer performed. I'm Carla Javier for MarketPoint. place. The frequency of extreme weather events have plenty of businesses looking for ways to

prevent emergencies. Out west, shutting down power is becoming a more common strategy to combat wildfire risk. In late December, Colorado's largest utility provider, XL Energy, turned off the lights on thousands of people near Boulder. The company says a downed power line could have ignited a fire, but the shutoff has sparked backlash instead. Yishon Tocor reports from Boulder. Losing power during the shortest days of the year was trying for Bob Carmichael. He's no stranger to difficult conditions. He's climbed mountains, explored the ends of the earth, and even made a film about extreme skiing.

I've spent a lot of times in big climbs and all kinds of stuff, but I know what I'm getting into. I don't just get thrust into it and say, good luck. Carmichael is almost 80 now, with hearing aids that need to be charged. For him, the whole experience was isolating. I felt scared. Excel cut the lights because of hurricane force winds and unseasonably warm, bone-dry conditions. It happened nearly four years after similar weather spread the Marshall Fire. That fire, it's Colorado's costliest.

It incinerated more than a thousand homes. Robert Kenny is the president of Excel, Colorado. The utility started notifying customers days before it cut power and then sent dozens of emails, texts, and social media updates. Kenny defended the company's decision at a hearing in late January. These were the exact same kinds of winds that were seen and that existed just prior to the Eaton and Palisades fires in Southern California. Utilities across the west shut off power to prevent fires. After all, no one wants another Lahaina or Altadena. But shutoffs can be a blunt tool.

They hit the elderly, sick, and poor people hard. Betty Devine and her roommate Beatrice Bell lost power for days. They've lived together for years in low-income housing in Boulder. Here's Devine. She's my best friend. You know, I consider her more than a sister. We say we're sisters from another mother. Belle has stage four breast cancer and divines her caretaker.

Money is tight. After paying for rent and utilities, they have just $300 a month to pay for medicine, groceries, and hospital bills. The shutoff threw a wrench in their careful planning. They lost around $200 worth of food, wiping out their reserves. Still, they felt lucky. Last month, Bell's doctors put her on oxygen, which means she now needs power, 24-7. We're glad that it happened before she went on oxygen. at the same time, it was really bad for a lot of people.

And we're just one of many that were affected. California was the first state to cut power to prevent fires. Michael Wara directs the climate and energy policy program at Stanford. He says shutoffs work. Is it a drag? Yeah. No one loves a power shutoff. But they really do prevent fires under the most dangerous of circumstances,

where the firefighters are not going to be as effective. Wara says that utilities like PG&E have gotten much better at targeting, so only the highest risk areas go dark. And Wara thinks Excel will get better at shutting off power and turning it back on in the future. It's something we have come to accept in California. I think many other Western states are going to have to accept it as well. Because you can't run the grid when it might kill someone by running it.

Power shutoffs are just one tool, utilities across the West, used to prevent wildfires. But they may become more common because of how hot and dry it is. Getting used to the dark could be a new normal, as more Americans learn to live with fire risk year-round. In Boulder, I'm Yshantakor for Marketplace. Coming up, truly, I empathize so much with people like yourself who find these threats in the wild. The wild is full of lions and tigers and also skis. website? But first, let's do the numbers. The Dow Jones Industrial average found 52 points, a tenth of a percent, to close at 50,088. The NASDAQ gave up 136 points, 6 tenths percent,

to finish at 23,102. And the S&P 500 fell 23 points, a third of a percent, to end at 6941. Wall Street analysts had been expecting Coca-Cola to report solid fourth quarter or earnings this morning, but instead, Cokes revenues fell short of expectations. Shares flattened 1.5%. Bonds rose, the yield on the 10-year T-note fell to 4.13%. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kristen Schwab. There's been a stunning sell-off happening in the Bitcoin market. The price of the cryptocurrency, as of this airing, is hovering around $70,000. It's recovered just a hair after tanking last week. In total, Bitcoin has lost $4,000. 40% of its value since this past fall. And we're seeing similar stories play out in other

corners of the crypto market. That's left investors asking, why did this happen? And why now? Marketplace's Sabree Beneshire explains. Susan Kaminar lives in Denver, Colorado, and she got into cryptocurrency around 2018 for one main reason. Honestly, phomo. FOMO led me to it. Now, she does not have her whole life savings in there or anything, just an amount she was willing to gamble with. But even so, when the price dropped last week, I definitely freaked out, had a little mini panic attack inside. I'd never seen it tank that fast and that dramatically before. But for now, Kemenar is not ready to let the dream die quite yet. Ultimately, I was still in the green, so I decided to hold. It's already plateaued

and kind of bounced back up to the 70 mark. So this is not the day. to end all dips. There's no way. Others are not so sure. Paul Krugman is a professor of economics at City University, and he says this could be what he calls crypto-fimble winter. In Norse mythology, the fimbled winter is the three-year-long winter that precedes the end of days. So it's kind of the final winter. Definitely feels like final winter in New York in a lot of places right now. Krugman says Bitcoin has had 17 years to prove itself and maybe

time is up. How often can you convince people that something is the currency of the future? Where is the actual use? It was supposed to be a safe haven, something that people would buy when deeply concerned, but we're not seeing that. It's behaving like a speculative tech stock. Some crypto-optimists will give Krugman that. Igor Payich is a tech analyst and author of tech money. We saw a narrative basically fall apart. The narrative of Bitcoin is a protection against inflation and government spending in a muck. But actually with every business cycle, we saw that this was not true. When times are good, people pile in to crypto.

When times are panicky, people stampede out. And there is a lot of anxiety about AI disruption and AI bubbles and just the world. But that means there will be non-panicky times again one day. I think this is just a temporary impact. Surveys by Deutsche Bank research show Bitcoin adoption fell from 17% in the U.S. U.S. U.S.K. in Europe in July to just 12% in December. But it does still hold a lot of value. Marion LeBuré is a senior strategist at Deutsche Bank Research.

If I looked at the price of Bitcoin since 2023, it has increased by 370%. That is even after tanking. Some of Bitcoin's hypergrowth was what she calls the Tinkerbell effect, basically wishful thinking. But with that fading, Leibre says the original cryptocurrency, is still kind of entrenched. Ten years ago, it was a speculative asset. Now it's becoming much more an institutional reality. Institutional investors may be part of the reason Bitcoin tanked so hard.

These investors sometimes invest on borrowed money and have to repay it quick. And those investors will be back, says Beto Aparicio, senior strategic finance manager at off-chain labs, which is developing a type of crypto infrastructure, in part because regulators are becoming more crypto-friendly. Government around the world are actively defining crypto regulations, right? Everybody's trying to make sure that we have some support. So maybe we're in crypto-fimble winter, or maybe it's just a cold snap.

In New York, I'm Sabri Benishore for Marketplace. Nothing is really certain in this life, except death, taxes, and maybe scams? Yes, scams have been around for, and they evolve to be more complex and convincing as technology evolves. Enter, of course, artificial intelligence. AI coding agents have been getting so good that even people with little technical knowledge can program their software or build a website, including scammers. Here's Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino.

The other night, I'm sort of half watching a spy thriller on Hulu and shopping on my phone for a hair care product. If you must know, it was the curl moisturizing moose from the Italian luxury brand Daviness. Being the savvy consumer I am, I know you can sometimes end up with counterfeit beauty products, so I head over to Google to find something trustworthy. First sponsored result, the Daviness North America official online shop. Spoiler, it was not. Truly, I empathize so much with people like yourself who find these threats in the wild

and assume that they are legitimate. That's Ginny Spicer, a threat intelligence analyst at Cybersecurity firm Netcraft, which says last year it identified 100,000 AI-generated websites impersonating almost 200 different brands. We can see the basic hallmarks of AI generation that you might see repeated in the code. We're even watching to see how many emojis are left into the site code, because that's not something people typically do. But on the front end, my fake Daviness website looked nearly identical to the real thing, at least on a mobile phone, no misspellings or janky graphics. It's not that I didn't know that sophisticated scam websites exist. They've been around a while.

I guess I just wasn't expecting to encounter one in a Google search for a niche Italian hair product. Charles Henderson with cybersecurity firm Coalfire says AI has changed. the economics of scamming. It's the same scam. It's just, it's cheaper to do it on a broader scale. In the old days, my Daviness scammer would either have had to learn specialized skills or hire someone with them, spend a bunch of time building a site and then hope enough shoppers of a relatively obscure brand handed over their credit card numbers in the short window of

time before the scam inevitably got reported. But AI makes it possible to generate. dozens of official-looking sites a day with just a few prompts. And that means the return on investment's higher. That means it's going to be more prolific. Smaller brands and e-commerce operations are now being targeted by impostors, says Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at Silent Push. You're, you know, a luxury hair brand.

You've never had any cyber threats targeting you. And then suddenly you get dozens of customers who are like, I lost $1,000. And so a lot of these brands are facing this challenge of, how do I find these? How do I warn my customers that this could exist? He says because fake sites are cheaper to produce, scammers don't have to be so aggressive in finding victims with unsolicited emails or text, which many consumers have grown skeptical of. Imagine you're on a social network and you've liked a luxury brand. A scammer can buy ads

targeting people who have liked that luxury brand. You Googled it. It was on the first page of results. How could it be bad? He says, the U.S. usual red flags apply, like discounts that are too good to be true, but we now have to be vigilant in contexts we might not have expected. And we've got all kinds of AI agents out there doing who knows what, says Lana Swartz, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. The more and more that AI becomes like infrastructural and become part of our everyday lives, the more likely we are to encounter scams and fraud. Whether it's deep-faced, videos, job scams, or imposter websites, AI is scrambling the signals we use to make sense of the world.

We absolutely are moving into an era where we're going to have to recalibrate our epistemologies in just about every aspect of our lives. I did finally realize the Daviness site was fake. About half a second before I hit the buy button, I glanced down at the URL. which said da Vinius.com. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino for Marketplace. This final note on the way out today saw this in Business Insider. Do you consider Cardi B's presence during the Super Bowl halftime show, a performance or an appearance? And does an appearance count as a performance? I ask because there's money on the line, and the major prediction markets don't agree.

People placed bets on whether Cardi B would perform during Bad Bunny's set. The rapper was seen dancing along on stage, but not singing. Polly Market has decided that, yes, this counts as a performance. Meanwhile, Kalshi is not picking sides. It chose to instead settle the market at the last traded price because of ambiguity. Cali saw more than $1 billion in trading volume on Sunday, a daily record high. Jordan Manji, Sonal Maharaj, Janet Wyn, Olga Oxman, and Virginia K. K. Smith are the digital team. and I'm Kristen Schwab. We will see you back here tomorrow.

This is APM. Have you ever kept a financial secret from a partner? I'm Rima Grace, and this week on This Is Uncomfortable, I sit down with a divorce lawyer who shares some pretty extreme cases of financial secrecy. They had a forensic account, went through the numbers, and they calculated that he spent $250,000 in a year on strip clubs. And I also chat with a couples counselor about how financial issues in a relationship are often really about trust and power.

I find that a lot of dudes typically are like I know how to spend the money the right way. I should be the one that has all the control over it and you with your girl brain don't understand. Listen to This is Uncomfortable on your favorite podcast app.