• Marketplace, Friday, May 8, 2009 10:45 AM

It's quite simple really, the way that Janet Babin explains it. People aren't walking into Costco looking for paper towels and walking out with $300 patio heaters any more. They're exiting with just the paper towels they wanted in the first place. As a result, same-store sales were down 8% in April -- more than analysts expected.

"Costco has been brilliant in their merchandising of giving consumers incredible deals on things that they may not need to buy but things they may want to buy," says Britt Beemer of America's Research Group. "The consumer today, according to our research, is not buying anything other than what they have to have."

Beemer says that despite all of our financial woes, Americans can still be lured into stores if the price is low enough. But, as a commenter on the Marketplace website points out less delicately than we will repeat here, with all of the concern about global warming and limited energy resources, do we really need to be wasting energy trying to heat the outdoors?

Read the whole story at Marketplace »