It doesn't take a brain surgeon to suss out a host of negatives from the brutal earnings results and conference calls from Target and Walmart this week.

All of them come to the same conclusion though: Consumers are being financially battered by inflation and the economy is slowing much quicker than Wall Street economists have factored into their 500-step multi-factor models.

"It has been a wild 48 hours in retail," Jefferies Analyst Steph Wissink said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). "We heard from Walmart yesterday and Target today. One of the things that stood out to us was the common patterns. We are seeing both companies are signaling that their stores are seeing strong traffic versus e-commerce. Both are seeing high costs to execute their business. Consumers are moving more towards essentials versus discretionary merchandise."

"The last thing is not going to abate anytime soon," Wissink added. "There were a lot of conversations among investors that maybe inflation for the consumer has peaked, but these companies are giving us very different signals that we are still seeing costs rise more than prices."

Wild may even be an understatement. The two retailers have shed more than $65 billion in combined market cap in the past two sessions alone as investors rerate both stocks for the leaner quarters ahead.

The poor quarters from Walmart and Target have unleashed major sell-offs in other household name retailers such as Best Buy, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Costco.

Here are three takeaways that caught the analytical eyes of us here at Yahoo Finance.

1. Inflation has gotten out of control

Walmart and Target both saw serious margin pressure as inflation in the supply chain bore down on financial statements. The discounters were caught flat-footed in not raising prices fast enough to offset inflation's ugly tentacles.

"We never expected the kind of cost increases in freight and transportation that we're seeing right now," Target chairman and CEO Brian Cornell told Yahoo Finance. Target estimates it may see an additional $1 billion in freight and transportation costs this year tied to near-record-high fuel and diesel prices.

The inflation theme was similar at Walmart, too.

"We still feel great about the business model of the company. I feel good about the year. It's that we're dealing with some things that we haven't dealt with before, and we'll work our way through it," Walmart CFO Brett Biggs conceded in an interview with Yahoo Finance.