No one had expected much “ho ho ho” in the crucial festive retail sales figures published today.
However, these official December retail sales data for Great Britain were a lot worse than expected.
And the breakdown of the figures, from the Office for National Statistics, offered precious little comfort.
Retail sales volumes tumbled by 3.2% month-on-month in December on a seasonally adjusted basis.
This drop was worse than any projection in Reuters’ poll of economists, who had overall forecast a decline of 0.5%.
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The actual drop was the steepest since January 2021, when the retail sector was hit by coronavirus-related restrictions.
There was a seasonally adjusted rise of 1.4% in retail sales volumes in Great Britain in November, the month into which Black Friday falls.
However, the December drop far outweighed this rise.
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The ONS observed that non-food store sales volumes fell by 3.9% last month, after a 2.7% rise in November “when earlier Black Friday sales, and wider discounting, increased sales”.
Food store sales volumes fell by 3.1% in December, after a rise of 1.1% the previous month.
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In the non-store category, which predominantly covers online retailers, sales volumes fell by 2.1% last month, following a decline of 1.1% in November.
Retail sales volumes over the fourth quarter as a whole were down by 0.9% on the preceding three months, the ONS figures show.
Economists noted that the tumble in retail sales volumes in December increases the chances that the UK economy will turn out to have fallen into recession in the fourth quarter of last year. UK gross domestic product declined by 0.1% in the third quarter.
Whether or not the UK fell into recession in the final three months of last year, with a second consecutive quarterly fall in economic output, still looks too close to call.
However, the retail sales figures add further to the picture of a UK economy that is very much struggling.
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