It began all the way back during the summer. Vice President Kamala Harris was in Singapore in August hosting a gathering of business leaders. Supply issues naturally came up, and the VP warned: The stories that we are now hearing about the caution that if you want to have Christmas toys for your children it might be the time to [...]
You just don’t see $4 billion monthly retail sales revisions, in either direction. Advance estimates are changed all the time, each monthly figure will be recalculated twice after its initial release. Typically, though, the subsequent revisions are minor rarely amounting to a billion. Four times that? Last month, the Census Bureau reported that retail sales during the Christmas holiday were [...]
Ignore Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Those are merely an appetizer, an intentional preamble to whet the appetite of hungry consumers looking to splurge. The real action comes in December. People look, some buy, after Thanksgiving, but as anyone counts down the actual twelve days of Christmas and celebrates the eight crazy nights of Hanukkah that’s when the retail industry [...]
With everything that is supposedly going in the right direction right now, the US economy alone in booming out jobs and GDP, the last word you would expect to find attached to analysis of retailer performance during the Christmas season is “dismal.” The final numbers for the year have yet to be tallied, but the anecdotes have been trickling out [...]
We already know what the holiday season looked like in certain retail segments from ShopperTrak’s first estimates of mall sales and traffic. As it turns out, the broader retail sales data from the Census Bureau is not really that much different. There was a rather large downward revision to November’s results, making the December values somewhat suspect (and candidates for [...]
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