{"id":661477,"date":"2026-08-28T20:00:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T20:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/661477\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T20:00:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T20:00:38","slug":"why-retailer-inventories-rose-in-july","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/661477\/","title":{"rendered":"Why retailer inventories rose in July"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Retail inventories \u2014 the amount of stuff sitting on store shelves \u2014 have been slowing for months. That all changed in July, <a class=\"externallink\" title=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.census.gov\/econ\/indicators\/advance_report.pdf\">when inventories surged by 1.3%<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Storing stuff on shelves and in warehouses costs money and time, so businesses don\u2019t like to do it if they don\u2019t have to. Plus, what if nobody buys your extra stuff \u2014 then what? For the past year or so, businesses have been especially skittish and haven\u2019t been stocking their shelves very deep at all.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think a lot of that has been driven by a lot of the policy uncertainty over the last 18 months,\u201d said Michael Pearce, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.<\/p>\n<p>On-again, off-again tariffs and war make for twitchy business planning. But it\u2019s possible that businesses are now deciding it\u2019s been long enough: Let\u2019s do it, let\u2019s buy more stuff.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWholesalers are having to increase their inventories because their sales have just been so remarkably strong this year,\u201d said Jason Miller, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University. \u201cThrough June, sales were up 17% year over year.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He said a lot of that is for artificial intelligence and data centers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMachinery and computers and electrical goods,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n<p>Those things are not the whole economy. And it may be that elsewhere in the land of inventories, retailers are stocking up again not because of AI but because of the latest trade war.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe obviously had a period where tariffs were a bit lower, and then we\u2019re kind of approaching periods where they\u2019re likely to be higher again, so that may have caused some tariff front-running,\u201d said Stephen Brown, chief North America economist at Capital Economics<\/p>\n<p>But any time you have extra stuff sitting on shelves, whatever it is, there\u2019s that nagging question: Are people going to buy it?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSome of these imported products are simply not being sold,\u201d said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY Parthenon.<\/p>\n<p>Businesses don\u2019t like that. Time is money, yes, but so is shelf space.<\/p>\n<p>Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Retail inventories \u2014 the amount of stuff sitting on store shelves \u2014 have been slowing for months. That&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":661478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[174],"tags":[79,32648,179,18,19,17,279442,8881,279443],"class_list":["post-661477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economic-uncertainty","tag-economy","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-retail-inventories","tag-retail-sales","tag-wholesale-inventory"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117174915765771050","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}