Good evening: Markets weren’t kind to tech today, but some of the biggest Wall Street players and tech titans are still bullish on artificial intelligence.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who left his company a few years ago to go to space and get married, named himself co-CEO of Project Prometheus. The new startup has already raised more than $6 billion, partly from Bezos himself, and seeks to revolutionize manufacturing with AI. That’s a tiny fraction of the trillions, with a T, tech companies are spending (and borrowing) to build data centers that support AI.

The last time the Census Bureau gave its monthly report on retail sales in this country was two months ago. Those figures were for August.

We don’t know when we’ll get those figures for September and October, as the Bureau works through the data release backlog caused by the government shutdown.

But in the meantime, we’ll see quarterly financial results from a bunch of big retailers this week, starting with Home Depot tomorrow. Lowe’s, Target and Walmart will follow. 

Big retail companies will tell investors how much money they brought in between August and October. But they’ll also likely talk about how many things they sold. And that’s what Gaurav Chhabra, managing director at AlixPartners, will be paying attention to. 

“When a consumer walks in and buys fewer things at a higher price, that could result in a higher revenue performance by retailers,” he said.

Fine for those big box retailers, but if consumers are buying less stuff overall, that might not be great news for the economy. 

“What it’ll tell us is how consumers may or may not be tightening their wallets in the short and medium term,” Chhabra said.

And a lot of shoppers, especially on the lower end of the income spectrum, are feeling pinched. 

“Food is very expensive, rent is expensive, utilities are expensive, yet those are the priorities,” said Jessica Ramirez, managing director of The Consumer Collective. “So their discretionary spend is quite limited.”

Just in time for the holidays — the most discretionary time of the year. Ramirez’s firm has been surveying consumers who make less than $75,000 a year, and most of them are in bargain hunting mode.

China is the top export market for most U.S. agricultural products, and they had a big American pavilion at the annual China import expo in Shanghai earlier this month. American producers there sounded more upbeat as some — but not all — of China’s retaliatory tariffs have been lifted. Here’s our Shanghai correspondent's report from the expo floor.

We spent some time this weekend catching up with The Purse newsletter, which had a great recent issue laying out why many working parents’ single biggest expense after housing isn’t tax deductible. Plane tickets, computers and meals out — even that house, in some circumstances — get a government subsidy. So why not childcare?