WASHINGTON – U.S. retail and food service sales fell 0.1 percent last month to $384.6 billion, ending a five-month rise, as a decline in automobile sales outweighed the rise in gas-station receipts, according to a report today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The overall decline matched the median forecast from a survey of 75 economists by Bloomberg News. It followed a June gain of 0.3 percent that was three times the Census Bureau’s original 0.1-percent sales-growth estimate last month.
Excluding gasoline, overall sales fell 0.2 percent, the Census Bureau said. Gasoline station sales rose 0.8 percent compared with the month before to $ 46.04 billion – slowing from June’s 24.6-percent rise – as prices peaked nationwide.
Total sales excluding motor vehicles and parts rose 0.4 percent last month, lagging the survey’s 0.5 percent forecast, after rising 6.0 percent the month before. Auto dealerships and parts stores saw sales fall 2.4 percent in July after tumbling 10.5 percent in June.
Retail trade sales were essentially unchanged at $34.24 billion, or 0.12 percent less than in June. Sales at food-services and drinking places fell 0.2 percent, and sales at miscellaneous retailers were unchanged in July. But sales of electronics and sporting goods rose 0.8 percent, furniture-store sales rose 1.0 percent and sales at Internet and other non-store retailers rose 1.1 percent.
“We are in the midst of a long-term trend in inflation,” Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at Merk Investments LLC in Palo Alto, Calif., told Bloomberg News. “We can’t sugarcoat this. It’s not a good thing.”
Compared with July 2007, total retail and food service sales rose 2.6 percent. Excluding motor vehicles and parts, sales rose 6.0 percent year-over-year.
In other year-over-year changes, retail trade sales rose 2.6 percent, sales at non-store retailers rose 7.7 percent and gas station sales surged 24.6 percent. Food-service sales rose 3.2 percent.
Going forward, “a whole host of factors – unemployment growing, wages flat to stagnating, the wealth effect of lower house prices and stock prices – all are conspiring to forecast, I think, weaker sales ahead,” Manufacturers Alliance CEO Thomas Duesterberg said in an interview on Bloomberg Television.
Additional information, including the full Advance Monthly Sales for Retail Trade and Food Services news release, is available from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Census Bureau at www.census.gov/retail.
