Retail Sales YoY | Notes
The Retail Sales report is an aggregated measure of the sales of retail goods over a certain period. Usually, the Retail sales report is based on a data sampling that is extrapolated to model an entire country. Generally, the retail sales report not only captures store sales, catalogue sales and other out of store sales but also breaks down sales figures into groups like food and beverages, clothing, and autos. The Retail sales report is one of the timeliest economic reports, providing data that is only a few weeks old. The most popular measure of retail sales is month over month, where the volume of retail sales in certain month is compared to the previous month. However, some countries prefer the year over year measure where the certain month is compared to the same month a year ago thus accounting for seasonality and other oscillations in retail sales data.