Forget Paying Debt, Rebates Going to Best Buy

A Standard & Poor’s report (via BusinessWeek) doesn’t have a lot of faith, like many commenters on this blog, in US consumers paying off debt and buying groceries with their rebate checks. It says they are more likely to go on a spending spree at Best Buy…even if some credit card debt gets paid down.”Americans may say that they are going to save the money or use it to pay down debt, but even those who do pay down their credit card balances are likely to build them back up rapidly, in our opinion,” says David Wyss, S&P’s chief economist. S&P uses this chart to show how consumer electronics in the S&P 1,500 are expected to trend the index’s average. We kind of don’t understand it, but maybe you can figure it out.Anyway, we would tell you how Best Buy fared in April, but like more and more retailers, they don’t report monthly sales.So what is it going to be for consumers? Debt and groceries or plasma-screen TVs and Wii’s?