DECEMBER RETAIL SALES DROP .3%, 2009 SALES SEE BIGGEST DROP IN 27 YEARS.
"The Commerce Department said Thursday that retail sales declined 0.3 percent in December compared with November, much weaker than the 0.5 percent rise that economists had been expecting. Excluding autos, sales dropped by 0.2 percent, also weaker than the 0.3 percent rise analyst had forecast.
For the year, sales fell 6.2 percent, the biggest decline on records that go back to 1992. The only other year that annual sales fell was in 2008, when they slipped by 0.5 percent."
A couple of things really caught me by surprise with this article.
1.) That sales were down at all. As is pointed out further down in the article,
"December drop in sales was a surprise given that the nation's big retailers had reported better-than-expected results last week, reflecting a surge of last-minute holiday shopping."
Well, there's that old bugaboo, "better than expected", which as I've tried to point out before are weasel words. If you don't expect much, it ain't hard to do better.
2.) If I'm reading this right, sales are down from November!!!
DOWN FROM NOVEMBER??
That is huge. Because December for most stores is supposed to be the biggest month of the year. For me, November is the second worst month of the year.
I'm still thinking this can't be right, that either this isn't be reported correctly or that I'm misunderstanding -- and that sales were down from last December. That would make more sense.
3.) What the hell is the use of all the reporting if they can't come even close to getting it right and are constantly contradicting themselves and revising themselves and who the hell knows cherry picking which stats to report and in what context?
4.) We've been up over last year every month since September, but I haven't exactly been crowing about it since last fall was the 90 pound weakling of all retail quarters since -- oh, 1937, or something. But if it's true that this December didn't beat last December for most stores then....well all news of the recession being over is entirely premature.
3 comments:
Turns out, Y o Year sales are up 5.4%. Still boggles my mind that sales were down from November.
Or the part of retail affected by Christmas isn't as big as I thought...
The data does show an actual drop from Nov 2009 to Dec 2009.
Dec 09 is better then Dec 08. You basically have a fairly steady but slow improvement from the low point around Dec 08.
If you look at the retail sales graph from 2008 they dropped pretty steeply throughout the year and hit bottom around December. Since then in 2009 they have been slowly but fairly steadly climbing resulting in the total year over year being down, with this December being up a fair amount over last December, but most of the early month of the year being lower compared to the corresponding months in 08.(Dec is down compared to Nov but looks more like noice on the overall trend line then a change in trend)
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