Earnings Report: How Is the Retail & Ecommerce Industry Faring Halfway Through 2024?

Editor's note: This report features daily earnings coverage from EMARKETER's Retail & Ecommerce Briefing.

Retailers faced no shortage of challenges in the first half of the year as elevated interest rates, the lingering effects of inflation, and a loosening labor market weighed on consumer spending. Despite those obstacles, some players—including Walmart and TJX—seized the moment to drive better-than-expected growth.

The results depict a complicated retail environment. Even as consumers focused more on value, they continued to pull out their pocketbooks. That helped all three of the mass merchants in this report surpass our Q2 expectations. At the same time, other retailers, such as Home Depot and Lowe’s, fell short of our projections as elevated interest rates deterred big-ticket purchases, softening demand in the home improvement category. Overall, the results reflect a landscape roughly in line with our full-year expectations of 2.8% growth year over year for total US retail sales.

In this report, we’ll contextualize our coverage of retailers’ Q2 revenues across four key verticals: department stores (Kohl’s, Macy’s, Nordstrom); home (Home Depot, Lowe’s, Wayfair); mass merchants (Amazon, Target, Walmart); and off-price (Burlington, Nordstrom Rack, Ross Stores, TJX).

Key question: What do Q2 2024 earnings tell us about the state of US consumer spending?