Retail Sales MoM

Retail Sales MoM is the monthly change in Retail sales, Great Britain, the Retail Sales Index (RSI) from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It comes from the Monthly Business Survey for retail (MBS-RSI), an accredited National Statistic. It covers Great Britain retailers whose main activity is retailing. It measures goods only, excluding services, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and Channel Islands, unlike the BRC values monitor and CBI qualitative survey.

It is published monthly, normally about 20 days after the trading period ends, at 7:00am UK time, with dates announced 12 months ahead. Data cover 4-week, 4-week and 5-week trading periods, with an extra week added about every 5 or 6 years. One release takes about 27 days because the price basket updates, and spring timing can shift to avoid Easter price collection. The newest month is provisional and revises with late data, seasonal factors and annual updates, plus value, volume and internet datasets.

The headline is a weighted average, so its move reflects which retail sectors grew or shrank in the month.

• Predominantly food stores: supermarkets, specialist food shops and alcohol and tobacco stores, the steady staples.
• Predominantly non-food stores: department stores, clothing and footwear, household goods and other specialist shops, the cyclical part.
• Non-store retailing: mainly online sellers plus stalls, markets and mail order, often moving against high-street sales.
• Automotive fuel: petrol and diesel sales, a volatile part also shown excluding fuel in headline tables.
• Internet sales: a cross-cutting online share of the above, reported as a proportion and growth by sector.

In April 2020 volume fell a record 18.1% after 5.2%, with value down 18.7%. Non-store retailing rose a record 18.0% and alcohol shops rose 2.3%, while fuel fell 52.0%, clothing fell 50.2% and food fell 4.1%. Online share hit a record 30.7%, with most store types posting record online shares. The lesson is that the headline blends sectors and prices, so always check drivers and the value and volume split.

1. Sample: ONS stratifies retailers by industry and size, surveying all large firms and a random sample of smaller shops. It collects turnover including VAT, the sales tax, plus an internet-only split.
2. Edit: Each return is scored against expected sales, with odd cases checked by hand.
3. Impute: Missing firms are filled from their own past returns or register turnover for new entrants.
4. Estimate: Returned turnover is scaled to Great Britain totals by ratio estimation, meaning sample-to-register ratios set population sales. Internet sales use expansion estimation, scaling sample totals by business counts.
5. Value index: Estimated sales become an index, a scaled series set to 100 in the reference year. The reference year updates yearly, leaving past moves unchanged.
6. Deflate: Each industry value is divided by its price basket (deflator), giving volume, the quantity bought. For example, a value index of 105.0 with a deflator of 102.0 gives 102.94 volume, or 2.9% volume growth against 5.0% value growth.
7. Chain-link and adjust: Yearly weights combine industries into a chain-linked, meaning annually reweighted, index, linked at the lowest level using the final-three-month average. It is seasonally adjusted with X-13-ARIMA-SEATS to remove calendar effects.
8. Growth rate: MoM% equals 100 times the change divided by the prior index, using unrounded data then rounding to 1 decimal.