February 14, 2006
Denise Royal - All Headline News Staff Writer

Washington (AHN) – American consumers are spending money. The Commerce Department reports that retail sales, not including cars, soared in January by the largest amount in more than six years.

The Commerce Department says retail sales, excluding autos, were up 2.2 percent in January, the best showing in this category since late 1999. With autos included, retail sales rose by 2.3 percent, the best showing in 20 months.

Analysts had been expecting a rebound, in part because the weather in January in the Northeast and Midwest was the mildest in more than a century. The warmer-than-usual weather meant that consumers, happy that they were not being forced to spend as much on home heating bills, visited to the stores to redeem the gift cards they had received in December.

The warmest January in more than a century also spurred sales of building materials, furniture and spring clothes. The National Climatic Data Center says last month was the warmest January since record keeping began in 1895.

Conspicuous consumption is a term introduced by the American economist Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). The term is used to describe the consumption of expensive goods, commodities and services for the sake of displaying social status and wealth. The term is generally reserved for those forms of consumption that are motivated by societal factors and is not used to describe impulsive behaviours associated with personality disorders, such as binge eating or compulsive spending.
-- Conspicuous consumption (Wikipedia)