Holiday Retail Sales Grew 2.9%, Well Short of October Forecasts, Says NRF
Holiday retail sales increased 2.9 percent to $707.5 billion, reported the National Retail Federation Thursday, well short of the group’s early October forecast for a 4.3-4.8 percent increase over 2017 (see 1810030038). “All signs during the holidays seemed to show…
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that consumers remained confident about the economy,” said NRF President Matthew Shay said. “However, it appears that worries over the trade war and turmoil in the stock markets impacted consumer behavior more than we expected. There’s also a question of whether the government shutdown and resulting delay in collecting data might have made the results less reliable. It’s very disappointing that clearly avoidable actions by the government influenced consumer confidence and unnecessarily depressed December retail sales.”