Your firm was chosen from a scientifically selected sample of businesses. Taking a sample is less costly than contacting every business in the country. Smaller firms selected for the sample represent other similar businesses.

For more information, visit the Annual and Quarterly Services website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

Estimated time for completing the forms is indicated on the report form.

For more information, visit the Annual and Quarterly Services website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

We send follow-up letters and forms when the deadline passes. Your returned form and our follow-up letter and form may have crossed in the mail. If you have returned your form and receive another one just like it with the identical identification code in the address section, ignore it.

Some companies receive more than one form so they can report for different lines of business or for operations in other trade areas. If that's the case, you must complete and return the form for that different line of business or other trade area as well.

For more information, visit the Annual and Quarterly Services website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The Census Bureau uses IRS administrative data whenever possible. However, the IRS data does not provide the level of detail needed in most Census Bureau surveys. Also, some items are just not available from IRS data, e.g., merchandise/receipts lines, e-commerce, etc.

For more information, visit the Annual and Quarterly Services website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

Expenditures made by the employer for legally required and voluntary fringe benefit programs for employees. Legally required fringe benefits includes all programs required under Federal and State legislation such as FICA, unemployment tax, workers' compensation, and state disability payments. Voluntary fringe benefits includes programs not specifically required by Federal or State legislation, such as employer contributions to pension plans and life and health insurance premiums for employees.

For more information, visit the Business Expenses website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

Your responses are completely confidential under Title 13, United States Code, and are seen only by persons sworn to uphold the confidentiality of Census Bureau information. Data provided will be used only to publish summary statistics that do not identify individual firms. Title 13 also provides that copies of reports retained in your files are immune from legal process. In addition, reported data are exempt from requests made under the Freedom of Information Act.

For more information, visit the Annual and Quarterly Services website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

Sales from businesses primarily selling goods of any kind are included while businesses primarily providing services such as publishing and broadcasting are excluded.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

Seasonal movements are often large enough that they mask other characteristics of the data that are of interest to analysts of current economic trends. For example, if each month has a different seasonal tendency toward high or low values it can be difficult to detect the general direction of a time series' recent monthly movement (increase, decrease, turning point, no change, consistency with another economic indicator, etc.). Seasonal adjustment produces data in which the values of neighboring months are usually easier to compare. Many data users prefer seasonally adjusted data because they want to see those characteristics that seasonal movements tend to mask, especially changes in the direction of the series.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

Yes. The Census Bureau's seasonal adjustment software, X-12 ARIMA, handles leap year as part of the trading-day adjustment for the monthly retail sales estimates. When using a multiplicative model and the td (trading day) option, the February estimates are rescaled before applying the log transformation. This rescaling multiplies a given February's estimate by the ratio of the average length of February (28.25 days) to the length of the given February (28 or 29 days). No trading day adjustments are applied to end-of-month retail inventory estimates; therefore, these estimates are not adjusted for leap year.

Page 39 of the X-12 ARIMA documentation   provides a similar description of the leap year adjustment.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

[PDF] or denotes a file in Adobe's Portable Document Format. To view the file, you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader available free from Adobe.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The Census Bureau periodically redesigns and reselects the samples for its business surveys to reflect the results of the latest Economic Census. The Monthly Retail Trade Survey (MRTS) is being revised to reflect the 2002 Economic Census of Retail Trade and more recent data from the Business Register. This ensures that our sample is representative of the current retail industry. Revising the sample also allows the Census Bureau to redistribute the burden of reporting for small and medium sized companies. Our new sample was first canvassed with the 2005 Annual Retail Trade Survey. For further information on the sampling process, please see the MRTS technical documentation.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

No.  Respondents are instructed to exclude sales taxes in their reported monthly and annual sales.  However, excise taxes are included.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

2002 Economic Census of Island Areas: Puerto Rico Construction (Sector 23)   

The 2002 Economic Census for the Island Areas provides periodic and comprehensive data for economic activity and structure. Areas included:

• Northern Mariana Islands
• Guam
• Virgin Islands
• Puerto Rico
• American Samoa

[PDF] or denotes a file in Adobe's Portable Document Format. To view the file, you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader available free from Adobe.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

No residual seasonal effect. Once we adjust the series for seasonality, there should be no remaining seasonal effect in the adjusted series. The seasonally adjusted series is the combination of the trend-cycle and the irregular. Neither of these components should contain seasonality.

Passing values for quality assessment diagnostics. We look for M7 and Q statistics less than 1.0. These diagnostics help us decide if X-12-ARIMA can adequately adjust the series. Stability (small revisions) of the estimates X-12-ARIMA contains several different stability diagnostics to help us select X-12-ARIMA options to keep revisions of the estimates low. Besides selecting the best X-12-ARIMA options, we can also reduce revisions by running X-12-ARIMA every month to get concurrent seasonal factors and by using ARIMA forecasts that make it possible to use symmetrical averaging formulas in the calculation of the seasonal factors, trend-cycle, and irregulars.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The size of the revision for the unadjusted estimates is based on revisions between the results of the most recent Annual Retail Trade Survey and the previously published estimates derived from the monthly survey.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The monthly retail sales and inventory estimates are benchmarked each year to reflect the results from the latest Annual Retail Trade Survey and the latest Economic Census.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

We used quarterly e-commerce sales estimates for 4th quarter 1999 through the current quarter as input to the X-12 ARIMA program to derive the adjusted estimates. Additional information on the X-12 ARIMA program may be found at the X-12 ARIMA website.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The classification of wholesale is derived from the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). For more information please visit: http://www.census.gov/epcd/naics02/naicod02.htm#N42.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

No. The review of the seasonal adjustment output and diagnostics did not indicate that adjustments to the options were necessary for these months.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The e-commerce sales estimate for the prior quarter was revised to reflect additional response data.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The initial e-commerce estimates from the new sample were released on February 16, 2007, and presented data for the 4th Quarter 2006.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

No. The review of the seasonal adjustment output and diagnostics did not indicate that adjustments to the options were necessary for these months.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The initial estimates from the new sample are scheduled for release on December 13, 2006, and will present data for the November 2006 data month.

There was a special release on November 30 restating historical estimates based on the new sample. This release restated unadjusted preliminary data for September 2006, as well as adjusted data for October 2006, September 2006, August 2006, October 2005, and September 2005.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The automotive sales data includes sales of other items not included in the automotive units information such as used cars, boats, motorcycles, recreational vehicles (RV's), parts, and repairs.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

Monthly (or quarterly) time series that are totals of daily activities can be influenced by each calendar month's weekday composition. This influence is revealed when monthly values consistently depend on which days of the week occur five times in the month. Recurring effects associated with individual days of the week are called trading-day effects.

Trading-day effects can make it difficult to compare series values or to compare movements in one series with movements in another. For this reason, when estimates of trading-day effects are statistically significant, we adjust them out of the series. The removal of such estimates is called trading day adjustment.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

Yes. We mailed sales questionnaires to 284 firms in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.  234 firms were able to provide sales data for August, while 264 were able to provide sales data for September.  In addition, we mailed inventories questionnaires to 57 firms in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.  51 firms were able to provide August end-of-month inventories, while 55 were able to provide September end-of-month inventories.  This is consistent with previous months.  Further, many large, regional, and other multi-location firms with reporting offices outside the affected states responded at a normal rate.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

Firms are instructed to report sales net of returned merchandise.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

Each month, independent indications of how each kind of business performed are researched as part of our normal review of the estimates to detect reporting errors. This research includes, but is not restricted to, conversations with companies in our survey, a review of publicly available press releases from both companies and industry associations, and a review of other economic indicators.

The September or October value of a kind of business was considered to be out of the ordinary if it was found to be statistically untypical (as indicated by the appropriate t-statistics having a magnitude larger than a "standard" critical value) and independent sources indicated an impact from the September 11 events.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The sample is revised approximately every two and a half years.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The alteration affected the adjustment that had atypical results based on well-established statistical criteria. Its use minimized the chance of understating or overstating the increase.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

No. This option is used as a part of standard seasonal adjustment procedures at the Census Bureau but with a more conservative (restrictive) definition of what constitutes an untypical month. For these months, a definition of untypical was used that is customary in statistical practice when there is advance knowledge that the month's survey value has a strong potential to be untypical.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

The alteration affected kinds of business accounting for 60 percent of total retail sales for September and 9 percent for October. Note that the percent value changed for September because the t-statistics for September changed for two reasons. First, the data were revised to include results from the larger monthly retail trade survey sample. Second, new information from the October 2001 levels changes the range of typical levels for September.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

No. We cannot separately estimate retail sales for the affected areas since the MARTS sample is designed to estimate sales for the national level only.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

No. This option is used as a part of standard seasonal adjustment procedures at the Census Bureau but with a more conservative (restrictive) definition of what constitutes an atypical month. This month, a definition of atypical was used that is customary in statistical practice when there is advance knowledge that the month's survey value has a strong potential to be atypical.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email

Because of the implementation of the new classification rules in the 2002 Economic Census, some companies that were classified as retail trade in 1997 were re-classified to wholesale in 2002. In order to maintain the consistency of the time series, historic estimates from 1992 - 2001 were developed to reflect this change.

For more information, visit the Monthly and Annual Retail Trade website.

Was this answer helpful?

submit a request or question notify me share Paste link in email