• From the New York Times:
"Even as coronavirus infections continued to spread, in-person school reopening plans were scrapped and unemployment stayed near record highs, Americans kept shopping in July with retail sales rising 1.2 percent from June, reflecting a rare bright spot in the battered economy.
"The jump in sales reported on Friday by the Commerce Department, though far smaller than the increases in the previous two months, showed that the bounce back in spending to pre-pandemic levels was not a fluke. It was instead a sign that consumerism, buoyed by government support, remained resilient even as many other facets of American life were increasingly bleak."
• A sign of the times … in Connecticut, the Patch reports that the owners of the Connecticut Post Mall, the largest in the state, want to build 300 luxury rental units on property that was occupied by an old Sears auto center.
Local officials are not thrilled, and reportedly would prefer offices to housing.
Offices? Really? Have these folks not seen the newspapers, and the news about how the work-at-home trend is putting commercial real estate between a rock and a hard place?
