Retail Sales YoY

Retail Sales YoY is the % change in Advance Monthly Sales for Retail and Food Services versus the same month 1 year earlier. The Census Bureau compiles it through MARTS, the Advance Monthly Retail Trade Survey, an early cut of the larger survey since 1953. It covers retailers with paid staff in NAICS Sectors 44-45 plus food services and drinking places, in nominal dollars unadjusted for price changes.

It excludes most services, roughly two-thirds of consumption, not total spending. The Bureau of Economic Analysis uses it for GDP consumption estimates, and the Federal Reserve uses it to track trends.

The reference month is the calendar month just ended. Forms go out 5 working days before month end and are due 2 working days after. Follow-up starts on day 3 and collection closes by day 6. Release comes about 9 working days after it ends, at 8:30 morning Eastern Time.

Tables 1 to 3 cover levels in millions of dollars, adjusted and unadjusted, with monthly and yearly changes. They include sampling variability, a chart and the full text. Each release revises the prior month by 0.2% on average, benchmarks to annual totals and reads higher sales as stronger goods demand.

No fixed weights are published, so read each month's mix from Table 1 sales levels across these kinds of business.

• Motor vehicle and parts dealers: captures new and used vehicle plus parts sales, about 20% of total, so swings dominate the headline.
• Gasoline stations: captures fuel sales that move with pump prices, so reports also show totals excluding gasoline.
• Nonstore retailers: captures e-commerce, online shopping, plus mail order sales, the structurally fastest growing part.
• Food services and drinking places: captures restaurant and bar sales, the services slice separating total from retail trade alone.
• Food and beverage stores: captures grocery plus staples sales, usually stable everyday demand.
• General merchandise stores: captures department, warehouse club and supercenter sales, a core spending gauge.

The August 2024 release published September 17, 2024 reported $710.8 billion in sales on seasonally adjusted data. Sales were up 0.1% from July and up 2.1% from August 2023, and the monthly margin of ±0.5% included zero. Nonstore retailers rose 7.8% from a year earlier, almost 4 times the headline rate, while food services rose 2.7%.

The June to July gain was revised from 1.0% to 1.1%. June to August sales were up 2.3% on a year earlier, all nominal before price adjustment.

1. Matched ratio: sum weighted sales from respondents in both month t and month t-1 per industry, then divide current by prior for ratio R.
2. Advance level: multiply R by the prior month preliminary total from the Monthly Retail Trade Survey, filling missing values for only a few large nonrespondents.
3. Totals and benchmarking: sum detailed industries for broader totals, then align monthly estimates to annual survey totals. No births are added, and the sample is reselected about every 2.5 to 3 years.
4. Seasonal adjustment and % change: adjust for seasonal, holiday and trading day effects with X-13ARIMA-SEATS, a Census seasonal tool, run each month on all data. Compute YoY as 100 times (A(t) minus A(t-12)) divided by A(t-12), where A means seasonally adjusted level.
5. Significance: every change carries a 90% margin of ±1.753 times sampling error, and a change is not significant when its interval includes zero.
6. Illustrative example: illustrative matched furniture stores report $10.00B for July and $10.20B for August, so R equals 1.020. Times a $10.50B prior total gives $10.71B, and versus $10.30B a year earlier YoY equals +4.0% with an interval of 2.4% to 5.6%. The interval excludes zero, so it counts as significant.