Again, prioritizing spend/Further disinflation/Soft NY mfr'g under the hood

Core retail sales in October were as expected, up .2% m/o/m and with September revised up by one tenth and August down by a tenth. What is apparent again is the bias towards spending on non-discretionary items and much less so on discretionary.

To this, sales fell m/o/m for autos, furniture, building materials, sporting goods, department stores and misc stores (pet stores, dollar stores, convenience stores, etc…) while the biggest jumps were seen in health/personal care (up 1.1%), and food/beverages (up .6%). Online sales were up .2% after the September rise of 1.4% and are higher by 10.4% y/o/y. Spending on restaurants and bars were up by .3% m/o/m after a pretty strong run of gains and are up 7.8% y/o/y. Sales of electronic products did rise by .6% m/o/m but are little changed y/o/y, up 1.4%.

Bottom line, we’ll of course hear more about this from the retailers reporting this week and did so with Target, the internals of sales in October highlights the prioritization consumers are placing on where they spend their hard earned money.