The following is the unedited transcript of the news release from U.S. Census Bureau.


ADVANCE MONTHLY SALES FOR RETAIL TRADE AND FOOD SERVICES

DECEMBER 2005

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for December, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $357.8 billion, an increase of 0.7 percent (±0.7%)* from the previous month and up 6.4 percent (±0.8%) from December 2004. Total sales for the 12 months of 2005 were up 7.3 percent (±0.2%) from 2004.

Total sales for the October through December 2005 period were up 6.3 percent (±0.5%) from the same period a year ago. The October to November 2005 percent change was revised from +0.3 percent (±0.7%)* to +0.8 percent (±0.3%).

Retail trade sales were up 0.7 percent (±0.8%)* from November and were up 6.3 percent (±0.8%) above last year. Gasoline station sales were up 17.9 percent (±3.3%) from December 2004 and sales of nonstore retailers were up 10.6 percent (±3.5%) from last year.

The scheduled release dates for 2006 are as follows: January 13, February 14, March 14, April 13, May 11, June 13, July 14, August 11, September 14, October 13, November 14, December 13.

The advance estimates are based on a subsample of the Census Bureau’s full retail and food services sample. A stratified random sampling method is used to select approximately 5,000 retail and food services firms whose sales are then weighted and benchmarked to represent the complete universe of over three million retail and food services firms. Responding firms account for approximately 65% of the MARTS dollar volume estimate. For an explanation of the measures of sampling variability included in this report, please see the Reliability of Estimates section on the last page of this publication.




Available at: http://www.census.gov/svsd/www/retail.html