The article seems to operate on a different premise. In sentence 2, "At a time when the economy is growing, unemployment is low, wages are rebounding and consumers are eager to buy..."
Do you think they're looking at the wrong economic data?
As always, depends on how this data is being measured.
Unemployment is low, but the labor force participation rate is also low. Are the jobs good quality?
Wages are rebounding? I haven’t seen any evidence of this. There’s many people asking if the Phillips curve even works any more. If there had been any uptick in wages it’s a very recent uptick and hardly a trend yet.
It's perfectly reasonable to expect that you (or most other people) would not personally see any evidence of wage growth if it's happening.
In essence, if there's a 2% growth in average real wages (which would be a major change), then it generally would happen with, say, 80% of people experiencing no change or even a decrease (i.e. nominal growth slower than inflation), and a 20% minority, usually disproportionally concentrated in particular industries and locations, experiencing a significant (e.g. 10%) growth. And, this growth often is associated with a change in position, level or industry - most of the impact is not by the same job paying more, but by slightly less people working the low-paying job and by slightly more people working the high paying job.
So no matter if real growth is happening or not, personal evidence of the majority would not, could not show it unless it's on a very long timescale or the growth is sudden and rapid - you have to look at the aggregates to see if it's happening.
If wage growth is constrained to such a small portion of the economy, then how could it lead to runaway inflation like they fear? Couldn't they just push those jobs to areas of the country that haven't been experiencing the growth?
In short term wage growth, only a minority notices it. In long term wage growth, it's not the same minority every year, so a much larger part (though not all) experience it.
In essence, if the aggregate growth looks like "Yay 2%! Yay 2%! Ugh -2%! Yay 2%! Yay 2%! Yay 2%! Yay 2%!" as having growth almost every year, then the median individual would see the exact same environment as "Nothing :( Yay 10%! Nothing :( Ugh -10% :( Nothing :( Nothing :( Yay 10%!" as having growth very rarely - and connected (and attributed!) to something meaningful they did, not the overall growth.
But they do mention other categories growing. If clothing is semi-discretionary, travel and eating out seem like completely discretionary categories, first ones on the chopping block when the money is tight:
> Apparel is being displaced by travel, eating out and activities—what’s routinely lumped together as “experiences”—which have grown to 18 percent of purchases. Technology alone, including data charges and media content, accounts for 3.4 percent of spending. That now tops all clothing and footwear expenditures.
Anecdotally I don't think they're too off-base on travel and experiences. Airports seem busier and even with an increased number of flights the airlines generally run at higher capacity (although some of it could be explained by post-9/11/2001 slump).
Do you think they're looking at the wrong economic data?