ROCHESTER, N.Y. — No matter our feelings about the economy, it seems we’re still spending. Retail sales in September rose 0.4%, more than economists expected. And that’s a bit of good news.

It seems we’re buying lots of clothes and personal care items, and we’re buying a lot of it online. And it seems we’re spending more because with lower gas prices, we have a bit more to spend on things we want, and not just things we need.

For example, in September clothing stores saw a boost of 1.5% over the month before. And sales at personal care and wellness stores were up 1.1%. But stores that sell general merchandise saw the greatest month to month gain at 4%. Those gains offset the big drop in spending on electronics and appliances, with a month over month drop of 3.3%.

But Amazon hopes to turn that around. Just in time for Christmas, the giant online retailer has launched its first-ever Kindle e-reader with a color display. They’re calling it the Kindle ColorSoft, and it’s selling for $279. Amazon boasts that it has “weeks of battery life.” You can pre-order it now and it will ship on October 30.

More bad news for Tesla. The company is now in the bullseye of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This morning the administration posted records to its website that say it’s investigating Tesla’s full self-driving systems after several crashes while the systems were in use. In one of those crashes, a Tesla hit and killed a pedestrian. NHTSA wants to know if the cars fail when there’s fog or reduced visibility.

After those crashes, Tesla now markets its systems as ‘full self-driving’ – with the word supervised in parenthesis. NHTSA is investigating that sudden change as well.

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