Economic Indicator: Understanding Holiday Retail Sales
Tomorrow we will release retail sales data for November amid a steady drumbeat of news stories about holiday shopping. These stories beg the question of just how important sales are during the holiday season -- for overall consumer spending as well as for specialty stores. The short answer is that total retail sales (excluding motor vehicle sales) tend to creep up about 3 percent every year between September and October (bearing in mind that September tends to be in a bit of a post-summer lull). The upward creep continues at a bit over 4 percent in November, and then sales spike 17 percent in December.1 Putting these results in a different light, i