Yahoo Finance Amazon Prime Day sales may be 'last gasp of a beleaguered consumer,' says strategist
Amazon (AMZN) is "throwing everything" at Prime Day this year, Storch Advisors CEO Gerald Storch told Yahoo Finance Live (video above).
"I think the event will be successful — Amazon is throwing everything at it," he said, adding: "They're advertising heavily on TV, and they're throwing a lot of deals at this thing, they're advertising deals by their partners. They're pushing this very hard to make sure it's successful... so that means if they sold $12 billion, counting their partner sales last year, maybe it'll be up to $14 billion or $15 billion this year, which is pretty darn good over the two days. Putting that in perspective, they'd sell as much in total as maybe Nordstrom or Kohl's or someone else sells in their entire business for the whole year."
However, there's a catch: Even if this Prime Day is triumphant, it doesn't necessarily mean consumers are doing well.
"What we don't know is whether they're just pulling sales forward for later in the year or whether this will be kind of the last gasp of a beleaguered consumer," said Storch.
The state of the consumer, particularly in the US, is always a question at the center of each Prime Day — though that's especially true this year. Currently, interest rates are high and could go higher, and spending has been muted as the specter of student loan payments could be set to make things worse. In short, despite inflation cooling, the consumer is in the crosshairs.
To that end, just because Prime Day results may look good, "that doesn't mean we're going to have a great holiday," said Storch. It'll take some time to understand the extent to which Prime Day is, as conventional wisdom dictates, kicking off months of consumer spending that cascades into the holidays — or not.
"As a longtime retailer, I can tell you that anytime you have a sale, you can't just study that sale in abstraction," he said. "You've held sales off. They've been advertising Prime Day for a week on the site, and that means that some of the sales that people might have been booked for [on] Amazon last week, people were holding off, waiting to see if it went on sale for Prime Day. I call it a suck-in factor and a suck-out factor, when you're sucking sales out of the future and into the sale. So we'll have to analyze all that at the end of the day to see how good it was."
Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @agarfinks and on LinkedIn.
Click here for the latest stock market news and in-depth analysis, including events that move stocks
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
