From Yahoo Finance we get a story that calls Walmart’s quarter atrocious. When I heard Bloomberg’s discussion on the report this morning, they had a more positive view on the report. Here is what Yahoo Finance says.

Walmart is seeing what’s called a pronounced pay check cycle. That means store traffic spikes twice monthly when most people get paid. That speaks to a strapped consumer that lacks the confidence to spend unless they literally have cash in their pocket. Living paycheck to paycheck isn’t something you typically see in the fourth year of an economic recovery.There’s a limited pool of winners from Walmart’s weakness but they do exist. Sozzi thinks Amazon (AMZN) and Best Buy (BBY) of all companies may have picked up some of the sales Walmart didn’t get, but that’s not a ton of comfort.

"The big theme: they can’t get any margin, they have no pricing power and the consumer is not going to the store as much as they used to," says Sozzi.

Although the small business I work for has not seen the pay check cycle in our orders, we have seen in February that both the number of orders and the average order amount is smaller than last year. After several months of slightly positive year to year comparisons in February we swung to a slightly negative comparison. It is not pretty but it is not the end of world either. Walmart is confirming our somewhat pessimistic view of the retail market for 2013.