According to data released by the National Retail Federation on Wednesday, retail sales during the 2022 holiday shopping season lagged both inflation and industry expectations.
Per the data, retail sales ( NYSEARCA: XRT ) rose 5.3% year over year to $936.3B, as the industry group noted “continuing inflation and high interest rates” hampered results.
“We knew it could be touch-and-go for final holiday sales given early shopping in October that likely pulled some sales forward plus price pressures and cold, stormy weather,” NRF Chief Economist Jack Kleinhenz said. “The pace of spending was choppy, and consumers may have pulled back more than we had hoped, but these numbers show that they navigated a challenging, inflation-driven environment reasonably well.”
In line with retail sales data released on Wednesday , grocery and beverage sales led the way with a 9.5% increase from the prior year while electronics and appliance stores saw the steepest decline from 2021 at 5.7%. Furniture and home furnishings sales also dropped 1.1% from 2021. The NRF numbers exclude automobile, gas station, and restaurant sales.
“The last two years of retail sales have been unprecedented, and no one ever thought it was sustainable,” NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay concluded. “Nonetheless, we closed out 2022 with impressive annual retail sales and a respectable holiday season despite historic levels of inflation and interest rate hikes to cool the economy.”
Read more on the winners and losers from Wednesday’s retail sales report .
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Holiday retail sales fall short of expectations - NRF