Well, sales can be great, but if margins are lousy retailers are still screwed. Conversely, good margins can make up for poor sales. If both suck, however...
Reading between the lines of this report, it seems that inflation is contributing factor and to guage the true measure of economic output, one has to adjust inflation out. I don’t see where they did that in this report.
If ‘sales’, as determined by an absolute dollar amount, are up one percent, but inflation is up two percent, then sales haven’t risen. They’ve fallen one percent.
It’s like saying ‘there were 200,000 jobs created last month’. But the working age population increased 300,000 and thus the labor participation rate (which is the ultimate true employment measure IMHO) fell. They are cherry-picking the numbers at best, and outright fabricating them at worst, all to enhance the image of the Wun.
I used to work with closely watched descriptive statistics of a specific measure of societal function. I could make any number of manipulations to demonstrate any point I wanted to, so long as the recipient of the statistic was passive, had no access to the raw data, and had no clue or concern for the context.
We are being played.