Retail sales are spectacular, up 16 percent from last year! The best Christmas in a decade!
If you opened a newspaper or flipped on a TV last weekend, you were deluged with statements hyperventilating about holiday retail sales. Declarations that this was the best Black Friday in years, and it bodes well for the holiday season.
Savvy investors have learned to take these over-the-top declarations with a grain of salt. If you have paid attention in the past, the reality is far different from the spin: No Virginia, surveys of our gift-shopping intentions do not reveal our actual purchases. We humans are bad at forecasting the future and, as individuals, we are especially poor at predicting our own economic behavior. Marketers and trade groups, well aware of this, exploit that knowledge.
Let’s take a closer look at the annual hype that kicks off the season I like to call “Shopmas.” The actual data are much more revealing about the state of the consumer, the retail sector and the overall economy than the holiday hype.
We begin with a quick review of the retail sector in 2011: Sales improved versus 2010 by 3 to 4 percent. We use year-over-year comparisons because of the highly seasonal nature of retail sales. In 2010, sales were fairly soft, in part because much of the nation experienced severe weather. In the business, we call those “easy comps” — a low comparable data point that should be easy to beat.
Based on the first 10 months of the year, holiday shopping in 2011 should see similar improvements. Consistent with the year-over-year retail numbers, expect sales gains of 3 to 4 percent. Even so, these numbers come with caveats.
Prices in some products have risen — in some cases, substantially. The three most noteworthy are gasoline (up 15 percent), food (5 percent) and cotton (a whopping 230 percent).
The price pressures on these — all consumer staples — are reflected in the total retail sales data. When we look at total sales, we get a sense of how much the nation is spending — but, because of inflation, not how many goods people bought. Based on that data, we can conclude that a decent amount of the total dollar gains in retail sales are not improvements, but rather price inflation.
Let’s go back to the Black Friday hype, and see how this stacks up: Each year, we are deluged with “soft data” on Black Friday. We hear about foot traffic, personal surveys and expectations for the season. Overall, these early projections tend to paint a rosy picture of holiday spending.
The reports released with Black Friday and the holiday weekend are from trade groups representing retailers. (They do not hide this.) Each year, they make wildly optimistic projections, which are repeated in the media like clockwork. By the time the actual data come in, the projections have been forgotten. By then, we learn that early reports were pure hokum, put out by trade groups to create a “positive shopping environment.”
Let’s start with this whopper from an utterly breathless statement from the National Retail Federation (NRF):
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