An Offer You Can Refuse

A good negotiator will tell you that you’ve got to be willing to walk off the lot. If you’re buying a car, at some point, you’ve got to make it clear to the seller that you’re willing to walk away and find a better price. It turns out that American consumers have been walking off the lot. A lot. The result? Big retailers—who just maybe took advantage of an inflationary period by raising prices much more than they had to—are telling consumers to turn around and come back to the lot, because they can offer a better deal. Americans’ refusal to keep paying higher prices may be dealing a final blow to US inflation spike. “Consumers aren’t cutting back enough to cause an economic downturn. Rather, economists say, they appear to be returning to pre-pandemic norms, when most companies felt they couldn’t raise prices very much without losing business. ‘While inflation is down, prices are still high, and I think consumers have gotten to the point where they’re just not accepting it,’ Tom Barkin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, said last week at a conference of business economists. ‘And that’s what you want: The solution to high prices is high prices.'”