By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO, AP Retail Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Sales at U.S. retailers and restaurants were unchanged in October from September as consumers moderated their spending amid worries about higher prices and other economic uncertainties after splurging over the summer.

But a big factor dragging down the figure was a 1.6% drop in sales at motor vehicles and auto parts dealerships, hurt by the expiration of federal government subsidies that sliced demand for battery-powered electric cars. Excluding that category, retail sales rose 0.4%, the Commerce Department said Tuesday in a report delayed more than a month because of the 43-day government shutdown.

The overall flat spending in October was less than economists expected and followed a revised 0.1% increase in September, the agency said. Retail sales jumped 0.6% in July and August and 1% in June.

The federal government is gradually catching up on economic reports that were postponed by the shutdown.

“The retail sales report for October was a dud, but the underlying details offer more encouraging signals for (fourth quarter) consumer spending and an elevated starting point for the critical two-month stretch for holiday sales,” Tim Quinlan, an economist at Wells Fargo, wrote Tuesday.

Still, Quinlan said other data suggest some slowdown through mid-December and leave the firm cautious on how the consumer crosses the finish line.

The government retail sales figures, which aren’t adjusted for inflation, show that Americans remained selective in October as many households struggled with high prices for groceries, rent, and many imported goods hit by tariffs.

The latest job report, released by the Labor Department Tuesday, also shows a souring employment picture.

The retail sales report covers about one-third of consumer spending, with the rest going to services such as travel, haircuts, and entertainment.

Sales at clothing and accessories stores rose 0.9%, while business at furniture and home furnishing stores increased 2.3%, likely due to rising prices because of tariff costs. Most furniture is made in China.

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Online retailers posted a 1.8% sales increase, while department stores saw business rise 4.9%.

But business at restaurants, the lone services component within the Census Bureau report and a barometer of discretionary spending, posted a 0.4% sales dip.

The report comes as retailers are preparing for the crowds of last-minute shoppers with expanded hours and stepped up deals for the last stretch of holiday shopping before Dec. 25.

Hiring has generally been weak, while the unemployment rate has ticked higher, which could hurt consumer spending and the broader economy. The latest job report showed that the U.S. gained a decent 64,000 jobs in November but lost 105,000 in October as federal workers departed after cutbacks by the Trump administration.

The unemployment rate rose to 4.6%, the highest since 2021.

Despite lots of uncertainty, holiday shopping season had a solid start, with shoppers focusing on deals, according to data over the Black Friday weekend. But spending hasn’t been even across the board.

Third-quarter results from retailers released last month have been mixed. Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, posted strong sales as it pulls shoppers across a wide spectrum of incomes who are drawn to its low prices. TJX Cos., which operates stores under such names as T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, has seen an influx of shoppers looking for a treasure hunt experience.

But Home Depot has seen slower spending as shoppers focus on small home projects, while Target, grappling with weak sales, is trying to revive its reputation as a place for affordable but stylish fashion and home goods.

The National Retail Federation, the nation’s largest trade group, still expects sales over November and December to increase 3.7% to 4.2%, compared with last year.

Retailers rung up $976 billion in holiday sales last year, or a 4.3% increase from the prior year, the group said.

But spending trends by income continue to show a K-shaped pattern, with higher-income Americans thriving with their salaries and wealth rising, while the bottom part points to lower-income households struggling with weaker income gains and steep prices.

Based on spending from its credit card and bank customers, Bank of America Institute found that high-income shoppers increased spending by 2.6% in November compared with the year-ago period, while lower-income groups lagged behind with a gain of just 0.6% compared with a year ago.

“Near-full employment has continued to support broad-based consumer demand,” Moody’s Rating’s Claire Li, vice president of credit strategy, wrote in a report published earlier this month. “But slowing hiring, cooling wage gains, and mounting affordability pressures are eroding households’ consumption growth.”

By PAUL WISEMAN, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States gained a decent 64,000 jobs in November but lost 105,000 in October as federal workers departed after cutbacks by the Trump administration, the government said in delayed reports.

The unemployment rate rose to 4.6% last month, highest since 2021.

The November job gains were higher than the 40,000 economists had forecast. The October job losses were caused by a 162,000 drop in federal workers, many of whom resigned at the end of fiscal year 2025 on Sept. 30 under pressure from billionaire Elon Musk’s purge of U.S. government payrolls.

Labor Department revisions also knocked 33,000 jobs off August and September payrolls.

Hiring has clearly lost momentum, hobbled by uncertainty over President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Fed engineered in 2022 and 2023 to rein in an outburst of inflation. Since March, job creation has fallen to an average 35,000 a month, compared to 71,000 in the year ended in March.

Both the October and November job creation numbers, released Tuesday by the Labor Department, came in late because of the 43-day federal government shutdown. Those delays have made deliberations more difficult at the Federal Reserve, where policymakers are divided over whether the labor market needs more help from lower interest rates.

Worries about the job market were enough to nudge the Fed into cutting its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point last week for the third time this year. But three Fed officials refused to go along with the move, the most dissents in six years. Two voted to keep the rate unchanged while inflation remains above the central bank’s 2% target. Stephen Miran, appointed by Trump to the Fed’s governing board in September, voted for a bigger cut – in line with what the president demands.

Tuesday’s report shows that “the labor market remains weak, but the pace of deterioration probably is too slow to spur the (Fed) to ease again in January,″ Samuel Tombs, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconimics, wrote in a commentary. The Fed holds its next policy meeting Jan. 27-28.

The unemployment rate, though still modest by historical standards, has risen since bottoming out at a 54-year low of 3.4% in April 2023. It rose from 4.4% in September, and the number of people in the labor force – those working or looking for work – increased 323,000 from September. A rate for October was not available because of the shutdown.

Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, said that those pickups likely reflect former federal workers searching for new jobs. “Probably what’s going on is the 250,000 federal government workers who took the buyout are staying in the labor force and looking for work” and are therefore counted as unemployed until they find new jobs, Hassett told reporters.

The latest jobs figures could decline in the coming months. Last week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said that the central bank thinks that hiring has been overcounted by about 60,000 jobs a month since spring. “You can say that the labor market has continued to cool gradually, maybe just a touch more gradually than we thought,” Powell said at a news conference.

Workers’ average hourly earnings rose just 0.1% from October, the smallest gain since August 2023. Compared to a year earlier, pay was up 3.5%, the lowest since May 2021.

Health care employers added more than 46,000 jobs in November, accounting for more than two-thirds of the 69,000 private sector jobs created last month. Construction companies added 28,000 jobs. Manufacturing shed jobs for the seventh straight month, losing 5,000 jobs in November.

“The takeaway is that the labor market remains on a relatively soft footing, with employers showing little appetite to hire, but are also reluctant to fire,” Thomas Feltmate, senior economist at TD Economics, wrote in a commentary. “That said, labor demand has cooled more than supply in recent months, which is what’s behind the steady upward drift in the unemployment rate.’’

Adding to the uncertainty is the growing use of artificial intelligence and other technologies that can reduce demand for workers.

“We’re in Lehigh Valley, which is a big transportation hub in eastern Pennsylvania,” said Matt Hobbie, vice president of the staffing firm HealthSkil in Allentown. “We’ve seen some cooling in the logistics and transportation markets, specifically because we’ve seen automation in those sectors, robotics.’’

Because of the government shutdown, many agencies are playing catch-up with economic data.

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The Labor Department finally put out the September jobs report on Nov. 20, seven weeks late. It published some of the October data – including a count of the jobs created that month by businesses, nonprofits and government agencies – along with the November report Tuesday.

American companies are mostly holding onto the employees they have. But they’re reluctant to hire new ones as they struggle to assess how to use artificial intelligence and how to adjust to Trump’s unpredictable policies, especially his double-digit taxes on imports from around the world.

The uncertainty leaves jobseekers struggling to find work.

In May, Amy Beckrich, 54, of Farmington, Minnesota, lost her human relations job at a consulting firm. She’s since applied for more than 100 positions. Even landing interviews is difficult. She finally got one, waited 20 minutes – and the recruiter never showed up

Her unemployment benefits ran out this month. “It’s tough going into the holidays without any prospects or income,’’ she said. Her husband is still employed, but they’ve had to cut back. They’ve put off replacing their car and rarely go out to eat anymore.

“I feel like the hiring system is broken,’’ she said. “The human factor has completely disappeared.’’

AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber and AP Writer Josh Boak contributed to this story.

By Summer Lin, Los Angeles Times

Between 128,000 and 186,000 years ago, when ice covered the Sierra Nevada, a lake 100 miles long and 600 feet deep sat in eastern California in what is now the Mojave Desert.

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As the climate warmed and the ice retreated, the lake dried up, leaving a white salt pan in its place.

But a November of record rainfall has brought the ancient lake, known as Lake Manly, back to life. Now Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth and the lowest point in North America, has a desert lake framed by snow-capped mountains.

As far as lakes go, this one is pretty small and is likely to disappear soon.

But it’s a marvel to people who live in or visit Death Valley, and a reminder of the extreme weather that has been hitting the area more than 200 feet below sea level.

Climate change has been a growing concern. A few years ago, when temperatures approached the 130-degree mark, “heat tourists” flocked to the desert. Officials have expressed concern about how hotter conditions can affect the plants, birds and wildlife.

Then, there is the rain.

From September to November, the park received 2.41 inches of rain, with 1.76 inches of that total coming in November alone, the Park Service said. The previous wettest November on record was 1.70 inches, set in 1923.

The lake last made an appearance in 2023 after Hurricane Hilary, which degraded to a post-tropical low before reaching Southern California, dumped 2.2 inches of rain on the park and filled the basin.

Water levels receded until February 2024, when an atmospheric river dumped an additional 1.5 inches of rain onto the lake, making it deep enough that people could kayak on it. NASA researchers found that the temporary lake was about 3 feet to less than 1.5 feet deep over the course of about six weeks in February and March 2024.

The lake there today doesn’t really compare, locals say.

“It’s an attraction but it’s not really a lake,” said an employee at the Death Valley Inn, who asked to be identified only as Katt, when reached by phone Thursday. “It’s the size of a lake but it’s not deep. … It’s more like a very, very large riverbed without the flow — a wading pool maybe.”

Regardless of its size, the novelty of the lake is an attraction unto itself.

The inn has gotten more visitors since the rains, Katt said, because the hotel is only about seven miles from the park entrance and isn’t as expensive as the hotels inside its boundaries.

She said that business has increased 20% to 30% since the lake reappeared.

When the lake last emerged in 2023, the inn sold out for a few nights, she said. She has visited it herself recently and said the water went up to her knee in some spots.

The recent storms have also closed roads throughout the park, covering paved roads in debris and making them impassable, according to a National Park Service news release. Zabriskie Point, Dante’s View, Badwater Basin and Mesquite Sand Dunes remain accessible and open.

Visitors should proceed with caution if traveling on back-country roads and be prepared to self-rescue if necessary, officials said.

The lake is much smaller compared with previous years, and there’s no way to tell how long it will last, said Death Valley park ranger Nichole Andler.

She said that how long the lake is there depends on how much wind Death Valley gets, how warm it’ll be and if it rains again anytime soon. Visitors can expect to see the lake into the new year and maybe a little longer because temperatures have been cool.

“Some of the best views of the lake are from Dante’s View, and sunrise is a great time to see it,” Andler added.

Death Valley gets only about 2 inches of rain per year because of rain shadows from mountains. The towering Sierra Nevada range stops moisture from coming in from the Pacific, causing most rain to fall on the other side of the mountains.

Death Valley’s low elevation means that any rainfall that does arrive usually evaporates due to the heat.

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Last Monday, just hours before the candidate filing deadline, Dallas Democratic Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett made it official: The high-profile political flamethrower is running for the U.S. Senate. The move was not a surprising one, but it did finally bring resolution to the weeks of her very public consideration of whether to get into the race, which had previously featured both ex-Congressman Colin Allred and state Representative James Talarico. 

Crockett’s impending announcement prompted Allred to drop out, setting up a head-to-head contest with Talarico, a much-hyped political figure in his own right who’s built a large social media following around his personal religiosity and rhetorical skill. 

Crockett rose to political fame in Washington, D.C., as a fiery MAGA foil after succeeding longtime Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson in representing the historically Black 30th Congressional District, but Crockett got her start by winning a state House seat back in 2020. 

A former public defender, she’s a polarizing figure—beloved by many in the national Democratic rank-and-file as a brash fighter and derisively mocked by Trump and his faithful. She wasn’t widely seen as a potential statewide candidate in Texas, which has been uninterruptedly red since the 1990s, until her name started popping up in polling atop every other Dem in the state. It was then that she started really considering the case. 

Her decision to get in the Democratic race to face off against either incumbent Senator John Cornyn or one of his challengers, who include Attorney General Ken Paxton, has sparked backlash among both armchair analysts and Dem apparatchiks who think she’s uniquely positioned to lose the state in disastrous fashion—potentially risking any down-ballot upside from a predicted 2026 blue wave. Crockett, meanwhile, says that she’ll be uniquely capable of rallying the party’s base and mobilizing millions of non-voters to come out for her. 

The Texas Observer spoke to her last week about her decision to run, the Democratic Party’s struggling brand, and her potential GOP opponents. 

TO: You had been publicly contemplating whether or not to jump into the Senate race for a couple months. Why did you ultimately decide to run? 

So as we were analyzing trends and, you know, one of the things that I’ve spoken about publicly was the fact that we wanted to determine whether or not we felt like there was a candidate that could extend the electorate. We know that Texas has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the entire country. And so trying to figure out if there was a candidate that could get some of those people that are just not engaging to get more engaged, I felt like was gonna be our best path to making sure that we could flip the seat. And we were able to see some trends and evaluate some things and believe that that could happen. 

What issues do you plan to make the centerpiece of your campaign? 

I think affordability, end of the day. We’ve not raised the minimum wage in quite some time, yet costs keep going up. So I think that we will use images of what’s actually happening. So for instance, when we had the shutdown, we saw images of people lined up at food banks trying to get food, many of them working folk.

And so we have a problem in this country where we’re giving as many tax breaks as we can find, permanent tax breaks, to go to the top and therefore limiting the amount of money that’s coming into our federal government—to the extent that we say, “Well now we can’t afford to do Medicaid and Medicare.” But at the same time that we are putting more money into the top one percent of pockets, we also are footing the bill for the fact that they are not paying their workers a livable wage.

I think that that is what you do is you connect the dots of the entire ecosystem. You talk about how this is an ineffective way to go about using our tax dollars. You talk about the fact that while you may not be on SNAP benefits, everyone’s cost of food is going to go up. You talk about the fact that they’re pulling this money away from those that are just trying to eat and that also impacts our farmers—as we’re seeing record bankruptcies with farmers and ranchers.

I think there’s always been this kind of like, “Oh well that’s a rural problem or oh that’s an urban problem,” instead of connecting it all together, because a lot of our struggles are the same no matter where you live. 

Frankly, I think I think people probably who don’t know me probably may not know how connected I am to rural Texas. 

You were a public defender for many years in Texarkana and Bowie County, right? 

Yeah. So I understand the struggle. I understand what it means and how scary it is when they’re talking about, say, shutting down one of the chicken plants and how that impacts the entire economy. 

Do you think it’s a valid critique of the Democratic Party kind of writ large that they’ve lost touch with everyday working people in their messaging and their priorities? 

I don’t think the priorities, I mean, I can go through a gazillion bills that we’ve got for working class folk, right? I do think that we’ve not been able to keep up with the communication standards, so to speak.

I think that as far as our ability to reach people, and as far as our ability to speak kind of plainly, I think that because we’re not reaching them where they are, because we are behind the eight ball, and because when we do end up in those spaces, many people are still speaking as if they are on CNN or MSNow or whatever—they sound like they’re on cable news versus the more relaxed atmosphere that it is to be on social media or on a podcast. 

So I think we’ve got work to do, but I don’t think it has anything to do with our policies. When you think about labor protections, you can only associate that with the Democrats. Even though I was really stunned when the vice president [Kamala Harris] was not getting some of the union support. That really stunned me. And I don’t know if that is a trend that we will start to see or if things will shift back. That’s an interesting thing that I’m watching for. 

Democratic statewide candidates in Texas have been losing and for the most part, by large margins. Is there a key thing that you can point to about why Democrats have continuously been losing and what you specifically plan to do differently?

There’s a lot of things I can point to. Texas is a large state, land mass-wise, as well as population. And so I think that people underestimate how big we are, but also we’ve been under-invested in. People have not believed in Texas. And so the investments have not rolled in to make sure that we are organized. 

We always have amazing candidates, but I do think that we start with candidates that are not known enough and therefore they struggle to get known enough to win. When you think about the fact that this election is taking place in 11 months or so—this is a lot of territory to cover in that amount of time. And so I think that people underestimate just how much time it takes to actually break through. And while historically we’ve had amazing fundraising candidates, it takes a lot of money. It’s a $100-million-dollar raise.

I think that one of the things that put me into a different position is that I started with a name ID that was high. To be polling as high or higher than people who had already made those investments, had potentially run statewide once or twice, that spoke volumes to me because to me that meant that I was at a floor and not at a ceiling. And having only represented one thirty-eighth of the state and never made investments in a statewide election, to me that meant that I had a lot of room to grow. And so I think that we just start off and we’re already on second or third base.

You’ve achieved this high name ID in part from your ability to spar and go toe-to-toe with Trump and his MAGA allies in Washington. Some have said that that might work well in Congress and on cable TV but not to win a statewide race in Texas. Do you think that’s something that can actually be an asset?

I absolutely do think it’s an asset. And again, we can continue to try things like we have historically, and I think it may lead to the same result. You know, what we do know is that sadly enough, there are plenty of people that have described the Democratic brand as weak. And what we have found is that most people want someone that they believe will be strong on what it is that they believe. And even when and if they disagree with them, they can respect them because they don’t feel like they’re gonna waffle.

I think that ultimately it comes down to whether or not people believe that they are getting an authentic and real person. People don’t want a robot. They want somebody that they believe is just as frustrated [as they are] and is going to call out what is wrong. 

Crockett at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (Shutterstock)

The first step in the campaign is obviously the Democratic primary. You’re running against your former Texas House colleague James Talarico. What would you say is the argument for Democratic primary voters to vote for you?

Number one, this comes down to experience. You mentioned that we were on the state House level together, and we were. I’ve done that. But obviously by the time we get through the Senate race, [I will have had] about four years on the federal level. 

I’ve already built relationships on the House side, built relationships on the Senate side, and I’ve obviously already filed federal legislation. And so this allows us to kind of continue to pound the pavement. 

When it comes down to it, I think that we should be looking at who it is that can expand the electorate so we can win. We have spent a lot of time doing the philosophy lessons of who it is that we believe can win—and we keep losing, versus being willing to do something different.

If we want to see something different, then we have to do something different. And I can offer that difference.  

Is there a Republican opponent you would rather run against, Ken Paxton or John Cornyn? 

I don’t know. I’ll tell you that they are gonna have a long race. Knowing that they are going to be going until May [runoffs], I have no idea. 

But I hope whoever comes out victorious has been severely weakened and is in their most weakened state.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Everyone Knows Jasmine Crockett. Could That Be a Good Thing? appeared first on The Texas Observer.