What You Really Need to Know about the Retail Sales Report
The business news has very upbeat reports (”Retail sales surge”) of strong retail sales in January. They are fine as far as they go.
But (and this isn’t a media bias thing, it’s a personal preference), I think the most useful comparison is the current month of the current year vs. the same month last year, on a raw (not seasonally adjusted) basis.
These are numbers you can relate to (source is the retail sales PDF you can find a link to at the Department of Commerce home page):
An 8.9% increase year over year is very impressive. Take out the impact of higher gas prices (not shown), and you’re still near 8%. That is very, very good, which only leaves me wondering why the 8.7% Christmas spending increase was labeled very good, but not exceptional, when it occurred.
