 Despite the prediction from economics, economists rather, that retail sales would go up in February, the Commerce Department has reported retail sales drop 0.1 percent in February, representing the first time since April of 2012 that retail sales have declined for three straight months. Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, slowed for the first two months of the year, after accelerating at a 3.8 percent annualized rate in the fourth quarter of 2017. Here to discuss in detail about retail is Melissa Armo, the founder of Stock Swoosh. Melissa, thank you so much for joining. We know that after the holidays, generally consumer spending goes down. We get that. But given that paychecks are growing for workers, there's lots of jobs, we have still the 4.1 percent unemployment rate, 313,000 new jobs were created last month. Why didn't retail move more? Or is that just normal? Over. I think people tend to tighten up in their budgets a little bit normally in any kind of environment in January and February because people are getting the credit card bills from what they spent over the holidays. They get the bills and the bills are due, so people tend not to spend money. Also, people are usually waiting for their refund checks. People start to file their taxes in these first couple months before April 15th. And so once they get those refund checks, then you might see numbers pick up again in the spring and into the summer. So I don't think it's disastrous. I don't think it's disastrous at all. Consumer confidence is high like you pointed out. And the market looks good. The market looks strong. People are at work. I don't see any negative reason to get upset about it. It's just a typical time of the year. It's cyclical. When we look, Melissa, at the largest retailers in the world, and I may not have this right, but is it Walmart, the actual sort of brick-and-mortar place, and is it Amazon, the online biggest retailer? I don't know exactly if Walmart is the biggest brick-and-mortar. But I know that Walmart's stock didn't do so well in their last earnings report for this first quarter, although they really are one of the strongest retailers out there right now to compete against Amazon. But even Walmart isn't doing as well against Amazon. I don't know if they're the biggest one or not because don't forget you have Target too. Target has the brick-and-mortar stores too. And Target stock is competing against Walmart all the time for also in-store people. How do they get the people through the gate? When you get people to come out and go and shop and store, you tend to have them spend more. But Amazon has done such a great job getting people and getting their things right away. It's free shipping. This and that. Next day shipping. And Walmart and Target haven't been able to compete with those. And I don't know if they're going to be able to compete with those and that is the problem. Amazon is definitely the king, the queen of everything online. And I don't know how anyone can compete with them in the future. They're really just growing by leaps and bounds. I got a call in my driving home last night that I got a call from the guy at our apartment. He says, there's Amazon for you. And I'm thinking, well, why do you need to tell me? Well, it was food that was being delivered, delivering food now. So it's really they're doing just a bang up job. Well, you mentioned Target there, Melissa. And I think Target is either the number three or four toy retailer also, which brings us to four, I'm told, that brings us to Toys R Us closing down. And I was a little bit dismayed by the CEO who blamed it all on Amazon and blamed it on the digital age. Because it's my regulation that Toys R Us has had a heck of a problem for a number of years. A lot of debt. What do you make of it? They're a classic example of mismanagement. And one of the reasons that they're going under is mismanagement. Because you're right, they've had debt for a number of years. And not only that, they've had significant debt. They've had a lot of debt since 2005. They went private at that point. I think it was $6 billion. And even last year when they filed for bankruptcy September 2017, and they were trying to save it, they were trying to save it. They really didn't even do enough to save it between September and now, when they've just shut down or decided to shut down. They still had $5 billion in debt last year. And when you've got that much debt, it was costing them $400 million a year just to service that debt. They weren't getting ahead. And that was, again, more than 10 years since 2005, since they initially went private. So it's really mismanagement. They weren't doing enough sales. They weren't getting people in the store. They weren't competing online against Amazon. Amazon's been around for a long time. That's true. But when you look overall, they had enough time to try to pay down more of that debt. And they closed some stores before they had to go under completely. And they just didn't do it. I think it was really poor mismanagement. And it is sad. Because if you remember, Toys R Us used to be big. Toys R Us and Babies R Us. And when you were a kid and you go and shop in the stores, and they had everything, everything you'd ever want, every Barbie dress, every Barbie doll. That was the one place you could go. They had everything. It's true you can go shopping at Target and stuff, but they don't always have every toy that you want. And so that was the nice thing about Toys R Us. They had a lot of inventory. And now they're going to be gone. They had every Barbie dress I ever wanted, Melissa. Hey, let me ask you, though, about Lego, Hasbro, Mattel, Fisher Price. How are those companies doing? Bro looks the best of any of them. Mattel doesn't look so good. It's in a downtrend. That stock has been falling, falling for a while. So I don't know what's going to happen with them. Hasbro, though, is trying to hold. That looks the best of any of the toy companies. So we'll have to say, I think 2018 is a good year for companies, even like Matt, that's in a downtrend to try to turn around because of the corporate tax cut savings. They've got a chance now to put some more money and meat and potatoes into the companies to grow and expand and try to turn themselves around. And Hasbro could make a new high this year. I don't know. They're hovering, hovering, hovering. But with a strong market, Hasbro could make new highs again sometime the next 12 to 24 months. Matt has got a lot of work to do yet. That isn't a downtrend, but this is a big year. This is a year to do it. And you said a good economy. What's your outlook sort of briefly for this year for retail? For retail, I would say the retail has had kind of a strong start to the year overall with the market. But typically, retail doesn't end up performing until the end of the year because we talked about this last year, Black Friday, with holiday sales. But I would say retail. Some retails have had a good start to this year. Overall, I think retail is going to have a better year in 2018 with consumer confidence high and people back to work. And they have more money in their pockets with the tax cuts. But they still have to have good management. They still have to get the people in the door. And they still have to compete with Amazon, which, again, I don't think anybody really knows how to do that well. Melissa Armo, founder of the Stock Swoosh. Thanks for your time. As always, have a great weekend. It's always delightful to have you on the program. Thanks. Have a good weekend.