Consumer spending figures are frequently misused, often in an attempt to reassure consumers that everyone else is happily buying, so they should too.
There has been a lot often talk about bulk buying to avoid shortages, there has been encouragement to buy before tariffs hit. Bulk buying never helps the economy, the accepted corporate strategy to deal with it, is to do absolutely nothing. Increasing production only leads to a slack period later, while people exhaust their supplies of whatever products they bought in bulk. So while the government might try and sell this an increased consumer confidence and increased sales, the manufacturers understand that it is nothing of the sort.
Consumer spending will be up again next time they are collated. Not (as they will suggest) because of consumer confidence, but because people will be paying increased prices for everything.
Perhaps the saddest abuse of figures will be the increased sales of things like purchases of things like large household appliances, and other "big ticket" items etc.
In the UK in the ’80's the government used these sorts of figures extensively to tell the country that everything was fine. Independent studies were done and it was determined that the increased spending was in large part redundancy money, or spending from the last decent pay check that people ever expected to get. Knowing that they’d never again be able to afford to replace the washing machine, or car or lawnmower. Freezers were big sellers too. Not something that the British typically bought, but people realized that from then on, they would be unable to eat so much fresh food and would be getting by on whatever was cheap and could be frozen
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