Wholesale Sales MoM

Wholesale Sales MoM is the sales leg of Monthly Wholesale Trade: Sales and Inventories, where MoM means change versus the prior month. It covers US firms with paid employees in merchant wholesale trade, which means resale on their own account. It excludes manufacturers' sales branches and offices, agents, brokers, electronic markets, retailers and services, and it reports nominal dollars with seasonal and trading-day adjustment. Running monthly since 1936, it tracks sales and inventory trends and helps estimate GDP, a measure of total output.

The Census Bureau publishes one release per month at 10 AM Eastern Time, about 40 days or about 6 weeks after the month just ended. Each release gives preliminary current-month estimates plus revised prior-month figures, and preliminary figures are revised about 30 days later. It publishes sales, inventories and inventories-to-sales ratios, adjusted and unadjusted, by kind of business with monthly and yearly percent changes. Estimates use seasonal and trading-day adjustment, never price adjustment, and carry disaster notes and benchmark revision notices when needed.

Results group by kind of business into durable goods, or longer-life goods, and nondurable goods, or faster-turnover goods.

• Automotive and machinery: vehicles, parts and machinery wholesaling, tied to transport demand and business investment.
• Furniture, lumber and construction goods: furniture, lumber and building materials tied to housing and construction.
• Professional, electrical and computer equipment: office, electrical and computer gear sold to professional and industrial buyers.
• Metals, hardware and other durables: metals, plumbing and heating gear plus miscellaneous durable goods.
• Groceries, farm goods, apparel and drugs: fast-turnover food, farm products, clothing and medicines.
• Paper, chemicals, petroleum, beverages and other nondurables: paper, chemicals, fuel and alcohol, where fuel sales swing with oil prices.

April 2020 data, released June 9, 2020, capture the pandemic sales freeze at $395.4 billion, down 16.9% on the month and 20.7% on the year. End-month inventories still rose to $650.4 billion, up 0.3% on the month. The ratio therefore jumped to 1.65 from 1.36 in March and 1.34 a year earlier.

Pain was uneven, with apparel down 48.7%, automotive down 38.4%, petroleum down 35.3% and furniture down 28.1%, while farm products fell only 1.3%. Computer-equipment sales fell 5.9% as its inventories rose 7.2% and drugs inventories rose 6.0%.

1. Collect: About 4200 employer firms report sales and end-month stocks for the month just ended. Gaps are imputed from similar-sized firms in the same industry.
2. Weight and sum: Each response is scaled by its sampling weight, or 1 divided by its selection chance. Variances come from the random-groups method.
3. Benchmark: Monthly totals are aligned to annual survey totals, and month-to-month changes use those aligned totals.
4. Seasonal adjustment: Figures are adjusted for seasonal and trading-day differences with X-13ARIMA-SEATS using X-11 filters, never for price changes.
5. Month-on-month % change: It divides the change from the revised prior-month total by that base; for example, $510.0 billion over $500.0 billion gives +2.0%.
6. Inventories-to-sales ratio: It divides adjusted end-month inventories by adjusted sales; for example, $650.0 billion over $510.0 billion gives 1.27.
7. Significance: A move counts only if its 90% confidence interval, or estimate plus or minus 1.753 times sampling error, excludes zero. An asterisk flags a change whose interval includes zero.