Business | The missing middle

The business trend that unites Walmart and Tiffany & Co

Meet the winners from America’s consumer slowdown

Image: Emile Holmewood
|New York

After a four-year spruce-up Tiffany & Co, an upmarket American jeweller, reopened the doors of its flagship store on New York’s Fifth Avenue to the public on April 28th. At first glance the grand unveiling seems conspicuously ill timed. Hours earlier the Bureau of Economic Analysis had reported that nominal consumer spending in America barely grew in March, amid stubbornly high inflation and a slowing job market.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “The missing middle”

From the May 6th 2023 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

More from Business

An eagle sweating in his bed with a sign showing a red downward arrow attached to the end of the bedframe

Germans are world champions of calling in sick

It’s easy and it pays well

The illustration shows a man and a woman standing on separate stacks of coins.

Knowing what your colleagues earn

The pros and cons of greater pay transparency



Donald Trump’s America will not become a tech oligarchy

Reasons not to panic about the tech-industrial complex

OpenAI’s latest model will change the economics of software

The more reasoning it does, the more computer power it uses

Donald Trump once tried to ban TikTok. Now can he save it?

To keep the app alive in America, he must persuade China to sell up