December 23, 2025
Here are our picks for top news impacting retailers today:
- U.S. consumers displayed resilience this holiday season, with spend increasing by 4.2% YoY according to Visa data. “The underlying surprise here … is that consumer spending is holding up reasonably well in light of softer consumer confidence than we had this time last year and a number of headwinds and concerns about inflation,” Michael Brown, principal U.S. economist at Visa, said (via CNBC).
- Mercedes-Benz and parent Daimer AG have agreed to pay approximately $150 million in the settling of allegations suggesting the automaker secretly installed devices in hundreds of thousands of vehicles to serve the purpose of passing emissions tests (via NBC).
- Instacart will be ending its price experiments after news surfaced of the practice, in which shoppers were confronted with different prices for the same item, from the same store, at the same time, unknowingly. “Effective immediately, Instacart is ending all item price tests on our platform. Retailers will no longer be able to use Eversight technology to run item price tests on Instacart,” a company spokesman stated (via CBS News).
- The U.S. dollar has endured something of a rough year, but signs are pointing to a potential reversal of fortunes in 2026. The dollar’s simple moving average has been improving as of late, showing signs of what analysts call a “golden cross.” “[Typically,] a golden-cross signal has been bullish for the dollar,” Paul Ciana, a technical strategist at BofA Global Research, said (via MarketWatch).