Did the January retail bounce back really happen?
Apparently, reading the news headlines, January saw British shoppers out in force, with the largest monthly rise in sales since April 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics, up by 3.4%. But there are a number of reasons to question this positive picture. First of all, month-on-month comparisons, which the ONS appears to have imported from the US as a basis for interpreting sales, are a really bad way of measuring trends in consumer spending. They rely on seasonal adjustment of the base line, real-world figures, to try to compare between one month and the next. But how can […]
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