Courtesy of Doug Short.
The Advance Retail Sales Report released this morning shows that sales in May rose 0.3% month-over-month, down from 0.5% in April, which was an upward revision from 0.1%. Core Retail Sales (ex Autos) was up 0.1% in May, down from 0.4% in April, which was an upward revision from 0.0%.
Today’s headline and core numbers were below the Investing.com forecasts, which were 0.6% for Headline and 0.4% for Core.
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.
Here is the Core version, which excludes autos.
Here is a year-over-year snapshot of overall series.
Here is the year-over-year performance of at Core Retail Sales.
Here is an overlay of Headline and Core Sales since 2000.
After the May Consumer Price Index is released on Tuesday, we’ll take a more detailed look at retail sales adjusted both for inflation and population growth.
Bottom Line: The Advance Retail Sales for May, both headline and core, were weaker than expected. However, the Advance numbers are subject to substantial revisions the following month, as we saw illustrated in the upward revisions to last month’s even weaker Advance estimates.
