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August Advance Retail Sales Disappoint

ByDoug Short
Published 09/15/2013, 02:23 AM
Updated 07/09/2023, 06:31 AM

The Advance Retail Sales Report released Friday morning shows that sales in August came in at 0.2% month-over-month, a decline from July's 0.4% (an upward revision from 0.2%). Friday's headline number came below the Investing.com forecast of 0.4%. Similarly, Core Retail Sales (which excludes Autos) were up only 0.1%, a substantial decline from last month's 0.6% (an upward revision from 0.5%). Investing.com was looking for 0.3%.

The first chart below is a log-scale snapshot of retail sales since the early 1990s. I've included an inset to show the trend in this indicator over the past several months.
Retail-Sales
Here is the Core version, which excludes autos.
Retail-Sales-ex-Autos
Here is a year-over-year snapshot of overall series. Here we can see that the YoY series is off its peak in June of 2011 and has been relatively range-bound since April of last year.
Retail-Sales-YoY
Here is the same chart excluding the volatile gasoline component.
Retail-Sales-ex-Gas-YoY
Here is an overlay of the two since 2000, which gives us a better sense of the added YoY volatility that gasoline is responsible for in the overall retail sales number. For more on gasoline price volatility, see this weekly update.
Retail-Sales-with-and-without-Gas-YoY
After the August Consumer Price Index is released on the 17th, we'll take a more detailed look at retail sales adjusted both for inflation and population growth.

Bottom Line: The Advance Core retail sales came in weaker than expected, but it will be subject to revision for the next two months.

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