By Thomas Lester
Source: www.furnituretoday.com, May 2023
WASHINGTON — While the overall retail picture kept apace of recent norms in April compared with month-to-month and year-over-year totals, furniture and home furnishings sales continued sagging according to the latest advance monthly estimates from the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Furniture and home furnishings sales totaled an adjusted $11.398 billion in April, down 6.4% compared with April 2022’s $12.040 billion and down 0.7% from March’s $11.477 billion.
For the year, furniture and home furnishings has accrued $44.570 billion in sales, down 1.6% compared with the first four months of 2022. It’s another month of declines following a strong January.
Retail as a whole picked up $686.052 billion in April, up 1.6% vs. April 2022’s $679.473 billion and 0.4% vs. March’s $683.179 billion.
Year-over-year, only gas stations (down 14.6%) and electronics and appliance stores (down 7.3%) had bigger drops than furniture and home furnishings. Compared with March, sporting goods, hobby, musical instrument and bookstores (down 3.3%) and gas stations (0.8%) performed worse than furniture and home furnishings.
April’s biggest monthly gainers included miscellaneous store retailers (up 2.4%), and non-store retailers (1.2%).
The DOC’s advance estimates are based on a sub-sample of the U.S. Census Bureau’s full retail and food services sample. A stratified random sampling method is used to select approximately 5,500 retail and food services firms whose sales are then weighted and benchmarked to represent the complete universe of more than 3 million retail and food services firms.
