Retail Sales Again Soft In February 2014

Retail sales were up according to US Census. Our analysis disagreed, and the decline is even worse than our analysis because of the moderate downward revision of last month’s data. The per capita retail sales growth has almost disappeared.

 

Econintersect Analysis:

• unadjusted sales rate of growth decelerated 0.9% month-over-month, and up 1.5% year-over-year.
• unadjusted sales 3 month moving year-over-year average decelerated from 3.3% to 2.6%.

Advance Retail Sales Year-over-Year Change – Unadjusted (blue line), Unadjusted with Inflation Adjustment (red line), and 3 Month Rolling Average of Unadjusted (yellow line)

/images/z retail1.png

• unadjusted sales (but inflation adjusted) up 0.4% year-over-year
• backward revisions were again down moderately – and that makes comparison to last month’s data even worse;
• merchandise (online and brick) were the largest contributor to the deceleration this month to the unadjusted data.

U.S. Census Headlines:

• seasonally adjusted sales up 0.3% month-over-month, up 1.5% year-over-year
• the market was expecting between -0.1% to 0.4% month-over-month seasonally adjusted sales increase (consensus 0.2%) versus the 0.3% reported.

Year-over-Year Change – Unadjusted Retail Sales (blue line) and Inflation Adjusted Retail Sales (red line)

Inflation adjusted retail sales now appears to have a downward trend for the last 6 months. Retail sales per capita also seems to be in a long term downtrend.

Year-over-Year Change – Per Capita Seasonally Adjusted Retail Sales

From the U.S. Census Bureau press release:

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for February, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $427.2 billion, an increase of 0.3 percent (±0.5%)* from the previous month, and 1.5 percent (±0.9%) above February 2013. Total sales for the December 2013 through February 2014 period were up 2.3 percent (±0.5%) from the same period a year ago. The December 2013 to January 2014 percent change was revised from -0.4 percent (±0.5%)* to -0.6 percent (±0.2%).

Retail trade sales were up 0.3 percent (±0.5%)* from January 2014, and 1.3 percent (±0.9%) above last year. Nonstore retailers were up 6.3 percent (±2.5%) from February 2013 and health and personal care stores were up 5.5 percent (±1.9%) from last year.