The Week Ahead: What will America's retailers report?

Retailing in America has never been easy. The business eats its young and old alike. Consumers are fickle, and investors are impatient. It's a business model with a shallow moat around it.

But that moat continues to be drained away by Amazon.com. Just ask Macy's. Last week, the department store giant reported disappointing quarterly sales. It also cut its profit outlook for the rest of the year. The sour news sent shares of Macy's stock down to their lowest level since 2011.

Meantime, Amazon.com shares last week hit an all-time high.

In the week ahead, more than a half-dozen national retailers are scheduled to announce their quarterly results, including Wal-Mart on Thursday. The biggest brick-and-mortar retailer in the U.S. is coming off its first year-over-year decline in revenue. As far as sales are concerned, the retailer got a little smaller last year. Wal-Mart has been closing stores this year, most of them smaller outlets it started as experiments five years ago.

Retailers can be economic barometers for their shoppers. For instance, when Home Depot and Lowes report their quarterly results on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, they will be gauges of the construction and housing markets.

Survival in retailing takes size and selection. Publicly traded retailers need to be big enough to leverage low prices from their suppliers and selective enough to stock exclusive items not found everyplace else. At the same time, they have to be nimble enough to swap out merchandise that's not moving almost as fast as it takes shoppers to surf to a new webpage, lest they be swamped by their own moat.

Financial journalist Tom Hudson, host of "The Sunshine Economy" on WLRN-FM in Miami, can be followed on Twitter@HudsonsView.

This story was originally published May 13, 2016 at 3:14 PM with the headline "The Week Ahead: What will America's retailers report? ."