Category sell-through edged up in July
By Alan Wolf, YSN
A round of summertime promotions helped a traditionally sluggish period for home good sales across the country.
That’s the word from the CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor, which uses anonymized credit and debit card purchase data to compile monthly retail sales totals for all channels of distribution.
Fueled by the tent-pole July 4th holiday weekend and a plethora of post-Independence Day promotions both in-store and online, sales at appliance and electronics stores edged up 0.57% over June, seasonally adjusted, and rose 5.27% year over year unadjusted.
Likewise, furniture and home furnishings stores enjoyed a 1.41% bump in business last month over June, seasonally adjusted, while sales increased 2.29% unadjusted from July 2023.
“July’s data reflects what we are seeing across the economy, that while consumers remain cautious, they are still spending on essentials when they find value,” said Matthew Shay, president/CEO of the National Retail Federation (NRF). “Labor market trends have softened recently and interest rates remain high, but economic fundamentals are intact and inflation has fallen to nearly zero for goods, even though prices for services are elevated.”
Shay added that sales of furniture and electronics likely received an added boost from back-to-school spending on dorm room furnishings.
Total retail sales, excluding automobiles and gasoline, were up 0.74% seasonally adjusted month over month and up 0.92% unadjusted year over year in July, according to the Retail Monitor.
The CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor is a monthly measure of retail sales created in collaboration with CNBC and the National Retail Federation and powered by Affinity Solutions. The reports leverage Affinity Solutions’ anonymized and aggregated data from more than 140 million credit and debit cards and nearly 9 billion transactions, representing over $500 billion dollars in annual spending, to measure the monthly and annual change in U.S. retail sales.
The Retail Monitor has been shown to be highly correlated with the U.S. Census Bureau’s revised retail sales numbers, NRF said.
