the week that was
Behind the numbers
The unemployment rate in August fell to 8.1 percent, down from the 8.3 percent seen in July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Friday. Good news, right? Not so fast.
The economy added only 96,000 jobs in August, well below the 125,000 that analysts were expecting. The decrease in the overall rate was also due to about 368,000 people who dropped out of the workforce altogether and gave up looking for jobs.
About 40 percent of the new jobs were in lower-paying sectors that include retail, leisure and hospitality, temporary help services and home health care services, according to analysts at Wells Fargo. Of course, it didn’t take long for the report’s findings to become politicized (see below).
Shopping around
In the market for a new pair of shoes — or the building that houses them? The folks at Macy’s want to talk to you.
The retail chain’s Downtown location is still up for sale, entering its 26th month on the market. The store has consolidated retail space to the first six floors, with a salon on the 11th and office space in between.
As the Post-Gazette’s Mark Belko reported last week, Macy’s is having trouble in what has been a relatively robust real estate market. But as Gerry McLaughlin, executive managing director of the Newmark Grubb Knight Frank real estate firm, said, “It’s not as easy to sell a building that has a department store in it.”
Quote of the week
“If last night was the party, this morning is the hangover.” — Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, in a statement released following the jobs report on Friday. President Barack Obama had accepted his party’s nomination for a second term the night before, leading analysts to predict the report might damper any post-convention bump the president sees in
his approval ratings.
In case you missed it ...
Bowling shoes are taxable, but bowling shirts aren’t. These and other tax eccentricities are found in Patricia Sabatini’s Friday story on online sales tax and the state’s latest efforts to enforce it. Read more at www. post-gazette.com/business/.