April 15, 2020

Nobody Should Be Surprised by a Drop in Retail Sales

South Coast Plaza, once the mightiest mall west of the Mississippi, has been laid low by the coronavirus lockdown.Kevin Drum

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I confess that I just don’t get this:

U.S. stocks sank at the open Wednesday, dragged down by dismal earnings and retail data that offered new snapshots into the pandemic’s grip on the American economy. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 660 points, or 2.7 percent, shortly before noon and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and Nasdaq composite also fell sharply. The sell-off followed a blistering report on March retail sales, which plunged 8.7 percent for the worst monthly decline ever.

Of course the March retail sales report was “blistering.” There can’t be a single human being in the country who didn’t expect that. And yet, merely putting an official number on it causes the stock market to plummet.

I suppose we ought to brace for the stock market to be shocked once again next month, when investors pretend not to understand that lockdowns affected only half of March but all of April. This means that April retail sales will be down even more and the market can panic once again. Yeesh.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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