Retail sales fell 1.1% in July due to "signs of some pullback in consumer demand as U.S. Covid-19 cases tied to the Delta variant rose," according to the Wall Street Journal. Maybe:
In March retail sales increased a whopping 10%. We could hardly expect to sustain that level, and sure enough, retail sales have spent the past four months dropping slowly back toward the trendline.
But they haven't gotten there yet. Even with a few months of declines, retail spending is still 5% above where we'd normally expect it to be and 16% above last year. This is the metric to look at, and it suggests that the economy is still running pretty hot.