It seems that I was on the right track last month when I forecast that November retail sales, behind a stronger Black Friday, would be followed by a poor overall Christmas season. While Black Friday didn’t prove to be as big as I expected with a modest .5% gain over 2008, December sales were truly dismal again as huge sales promotions, extended holiday hours, last-minute shopping and gift-card redemptions failed to turn around lackluster performance in the largest sales month of the year.
The Commerce Department said retail sales fell last month, a 0.3% decline from November. The silver lining was that year-over-year December sales increased 5.4%, but those figures were helped by a miserable December 2008 that was easy to beat.
Here are from charts from that illustrate the points mentioned above:
This graph shows monthly retail sales since 1992.
This graph shows the year-over-year change in retail sales since 1993.
