CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Inflation is at its highest rate in about 40 years. Just look around and you can see the price of practically everything going up from food to fuel to even rent.
“I feel angry and tired and frustrated (about the pandemic,)” Raquel Aguilar of Odem told us as she and her daughter, Julissa, shopped at La Palmera Mall on Wednesday.
“Just frustrated,” Julissa chimed in. “Already over it. It’s already been quite some time.”
The pandemic is mostly to blame but as we maneuver through the coronavirus variants, one consumer expert says the economy is headed in the right direction.
So what’s different this time around?
“Consumers are concerned about omicron, but given the fact that the symptoms and the hospitalizations are lower, I think people are becoming a little bit more optimistic that we’re going to get through it,” Lisa Miller, a consumer advocate told us. “We had a base omicron, then we had Delta, then we have omicron. Every time the actual nervousness is a little bit lower than the time before.”
But what happens to the economy if there is another variant?
“When the new variant comes up, we will see a dip but what’s different is the depth of the dip is less dramatic each time,” Miller said. “But if it continues to mitigate and be less, less severe, for consumers, we’ll see ourselves moving forward.”
We asked Miller if people still have a fear, and if so, how will that impact their spending?
“What we’re saying at least in the short-term is that absolutely there’s been a hit while people kind of sift through it, but I do think it’s going to work itself out in the next couple of weeks and that way people will get back out,” Miller said.
When it comes to sales, retailers at La Palmera and nationwide say they have been much better than pre-pandemic levels. A lot of people, they say, just going out and buying plenty of clothes and electronics.
“It was record sales for the holidays,” Miller said. “8.5% sales growth period. The group that drove that were the consumers that were very anxious. Those consumers have not been out very much at all and so that was a really encouraging sign that they got back out and into the economy.”
In the meantime, both Raquel and Julissa are spending less, though Julissa also says when it comes to some friends and family, they “are splurging a little bit, over-spending, buying unnecessary stuff.”
