Retail Disaster: Holiday Sales Crater by 11%, Online Spend Declines: NRF Blames Shopping Fiasco On "Stronger Economy"
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/30/2014 22:09 -0500


Last year was bad. This year is an outright disaster.

As we reported earlier using ShopperTrak data, the first two days of the holiday shopping season were already showing a -0.5% decline across bricks-and-mortar stores, following a "cash for clunkers"-like jump in early promotions which pulled demand forward with little follow through in the remaining shopping days. However, not even we predicted the shocker just released from the National Retail Federation, the traditionally cheery industry organization, which just reported absolutely abysmal numbers: sales during the four-day Thanksgiving holiday period crashed by a whopping 11% from $57.4 billion to $50.9 billion, confirming what everyone but the Fed knows by now: the US middle class is being obliterated,

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Finally, what we said earlier about a surge in online sales, well forget it - it was a lie based on the now traditional skewed perspectives from a few self-servcing industry organizations:

Zitat

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Despite many retailers offering the same discounts on the Web as they offered in stores, the Internet didn’t attract more shoppers or more spending than last year. Online sales accounted for 42% of sales racked up over the four-day period, the same percentage as last year, though up from 26% in 2006, the trade group said.

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So to summarize: holiday sales plunged, and Americans refused to shop because the economy is "stronger than ever" and because Americans have the option of shopping whenever, which is why they didn't shop in the first place. That, and of course plunging gasoline prices leading to... plunging retail sales, just as all the economists "correctly" predicted.

Goebbels approves.

More:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-30...mes-retail-fias