Monday, December 01, 2014

Retail Disaster: Holiday Sales Crater by 11%, Online Spend Declines: NRF Blames Shopping Fiasco On "Stronger Economy"

Retail Disaster: Holiday Sales Crater by 11%, Online Spend Declines: NRF Blames Shopping Fiasco On "Stronger Economy" | Zero Hedge
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 (NRF), 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, and that key driver of 70% of US economic growth is in the worst shape it has been since the Lehman collapse, courtesy of 6 years of Fed's ruinous central planning. 
...Also did we mention the NRF is perpetually cheery and always desperate to put a metric ton of lipstick on a pig? 
Well, hold on to your hats folks:
He also attributed the declines to better online offerings and an improving economy where “people don’t feel the same psychological need to rush out and get the great deal that weekend, particularly if they expected to be  more deals,” he said.

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