Elgin Area Chamber Of Commerce: Retail Sales Climb, SpaceX Launches

Press release from the Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce:

September 17, 2021

By Richard Lawson
CoStar News

Retail Sales Climb

Retail sales rose in August, surprising experts who had projected a drop given the surging delta coronavirus variant.

The Commerce Department reported that sales increased by 0.7% from July’s revised decline of 1.8%, which was worse than the 1.1% originally reported. Wall Street expected sales to decline by 0.8% in August.

General merchandise stores, furniture and home furnishings were the biggest gainers on the brick-and-mortar side. But the internet business showed the largest increase at 5.3%.

Auto sales fell again as the industry continues to deal with a computer chip shortage that has slowed production. Electronics and appliances sales fell 3.1%.

Clothing was the big winner, rising 38.8% from August 2020, showing that back-to-school meant new clothes for kids, many of whom hadn’t seen a physical classroom in more than a year.

Sales at bars and restaurants showed no appreciable gain from July, but they are still ahead of last year by nearly 32% and still better than in August 2019.

SpaceX Launches Civilians Into Orbit

Billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX delivered four civilians to space for three orbits around the Earth, marking the first time that not a single professional astronaut was aboard a spacecraft in orbit.

The flight is yet another milestone in what Musk and other founders of private space companies hope grows into a passenger space flight industry.

Like Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Richard Branson's Virgin Galatic flights this summer, the SpaceX flight that lifted from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday evening carried a billionaire — just not one as well known as Bezos or Branson.

Jared Isaacman, the 38-year-old founder of payments processing firm Shift4, paid for the trip. For the SpaceX flight, Isaacman brought strangers on the flight instead of friends.

Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old community college professor, became the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft. Proctor was joined by Christopher Sembroski, a 42-year-old data engineer, and Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

Jobless Claims Rise

New claims for unemployment increased last week but not enough to sound alarm bells that the economic recovery is in danger.

The Labor Department reported 332,000 new claims for the week that ended Sept. 11, an increase from the previous week's 312,000.

Continuing claims, those who are still using unemployment benefits, dropped 187,000 to 2.66 million. Those numbers represent a pandemic low.

The weekly report likely will see some changes in the coming weeks because of expired federal enhanced benefits.

Source: CoStar Group, www.costar.com

This press release was produced by the Elgin Area Chamber of Commerce. The views expressed here are the author’s own.