As Thanksgiving, the holiday shopping season, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and all the other retail milestones loom on the horizon, it’s worth taking our annual look at the state of retail.

It’s of course far too early to accurately predict what 2018 retail sales will look like (as I always point out, Big Picture blogger and Bloomberg contributor Barry Ritholtz has an annual caveat about holiday retail sales forecasts), but a there are a few indicators that this year could be better than past years, thanks to what some have described as a “supercharged” economy and record low unemployment. However, positive macroeconomic trends may not necessarily translate to great times for retail; the economy has been growing steadily for almost eight years now and we still hear about retail’s hard times and its impending apocalypse. Like the printing industry, retail has become decoupled from general economic growth. Still, it’s not all doom and gloom on the retail front.

It’s always worth prefacing the conversation about retail with a link to a good Bloomberg story from around last year at this time, which portended a coming “retail apocalypse”—not due to the problems that are usually cited, such as millennials having an aversion to shopping malls, the growth of ecommerce, the dominance of Amazon, and the other usual suspects. Rather, say the article’s authors, “the root cause is that many of these long-standing [retail] chains are overloaded with debt—often from leveraged buyouts led by private equity firms. There are billions in borrowings on the balance sheets of troubled retailers, and sustaining that load is only going to become harder—even for healthy chains.”