Retail Sales

1) Anyone involved in the retail industry would be interested in these statistics. These following categories make up retail: Automobiles, Gasoline, Food service and merchandise. Owners, suppliers, customers and anyone concerned with the economy of our country would interested in the annual and monthly statistics of retail sales. These statistics can also show which categories have been effected due to the recession, as well as which categories are getting stronger and gaining sales from the past few years. 

2) These statistics are collected by The U.S. Census Bureau and mainly the U.S. Department of Commerce. Monthly and Annual statistics are given as well. Each section is broken down individually as well as a total, for example, food services, automobiles, furniture, electronics, gasoline and many more are broken down to show their individual statistics annually and monthly. 

3) An example of a annual statistic for Retail and Food services is a .3% increase in sales from February 2009 to February 2010 and monthly example is that total sales in millions increased to 355,546 in February 2010 from 354.399 in January 2010. Also percentage changes per month are given for the individual categories. Motor Vehicles and Part Dealers decreased by 2% from last February 2009, but electronics have increased by 3.7% since February of 2009. From these statistics we can see that although the automobile industry is not increasing their sales, overall retail sales are increasing which shows that retailers are going in the right direction. 

Sources:

http://www.census.gov/retail/marts/www/marts_current.pdf