Dec.retailsales post biggest drop since ’09

U.S. retail sales fell in December, posting the biggest drop since September 2009 and delivering more evidence that last year’s holiday sales fizzled unexpectedly. Even e-commerce suffered a big setback.

The Commerce Department said Thursday that December retail sales fell 1.2 percent from November. They were up 2.3 percent from December 2017. Total retail sales for 2018 rose 5 percent from the previous year.

Excluding gasoline station sales, which swing widely as pump prices rise and fall, retail sales dropped 0.9 percent in December. Nonstore retailers, which include mail-order and e-commerce vendors, saw sales tumble 3.9 percent. That’s the most since November 2008 in the midst of the Great Recession.

The discouraging December report raises concern about whether the retail sales slowdown was just a blip or points to a more sustainable weakness in consumer spending. But many analysts, as well as an industry group, questioned the reliability of the data. The National Retail Foundation said the government shutdown and the resulting delay in collecting the data made the results less accurate.

The stock market recorded big drops in December. And a partial shutdown of the federal government began Dec. 22 at the end of the holiday shopping season.

“We caution against excessive pessimism,” the economists at Oxford Economics wrote in a report about the government’s report.