Consumer Confidential: Sales, stuff and soda

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Here’s your whoopee-it’s-Wednesday roundup of consumer news from around the Web:

--Retail sales fell last month, but not really. They’re only down because they were up by a lot because of the ‘cash for clunkers’ program, which lured car buyers back into showrooms. Discounting the program’s effects, retail sales were actually up by 0.5%, which is a bit better than what economists had been expecting. The betting line among the pocket-calculator crowd is that the economy’s still crawling its way toward recovery.

--Some more upbeat news from the statistic front: Business inventories were down by 1.5% in August, the 13th straight month of declines. Why do you care? Because as companies clear stuff away from their shelves, that just makes it more likely they’ll need to order more stuff as the economy improves. More stuff means more production, which means more jobs. At least that’s the general idea.

--Our pals at PepsiCo are drawing heat for a new iPhone app designed to help guys score with women. Seriously. The app, called ‘Amp up before you score,’ is intended to push the company’s Amp energy drink. It allows users to pick the type of women they prefer -- ‘foreign exchange student,’ say, or ‘cougar’ -- and offers helpful pickup lines. Pepsi apologized via Twitter (natch) that it was just trying to be funny. Yeah, I love it when big companies show off their sense of humor.

-- David Lazarus