June US Retail Sales Jump 11 Pct YoY, Mastercard Reports

U.S. retail sales in June rose 11 percent year over year, marking the ninth consecutive month of growth in that sector, a new report from Mastercard says.

According to the payments company’s SpendingPulse report, retail sales were up 10.4 percent compared to June of 2019, with eCommerce growth steady at 8.3 percent year over year, showing a continuing, COVID-fueled shift to digital.

Back in April, we reported on the findings from Mastercard’s Recovery Insights series that found that — beginning in March of last year — consumers have spent hundreds of billions with online retailers that would normally have gone to transactions and at brick-and-mortar stores.

That report found that lockdowns and the shift to digital kept consumers at home, buying things that were delivered to doorsteps and leading an incremental $900 billion spent online — around the world — at retailers.

At a closer glance, that leads to another eye-opening statistic: $1 of every $5 in retail purchases was spent online, compared to $1 out of every $7 two years ago.

The June SpendingPulse report says sales growth for restaurants was up 55.1 percent year-over-year, while department stores and apparel sales grew by 67.4 percent and 62.9 percent, respectively.

This comes as “consumers continue to venture out more for meals and shop both online and in stores, refreshing their looks for summer camp, vacations and travel,” the report says.

The furniture and furnishing sector saw its first month of negative year-over-year growth, down 5.3 percent compared to 2020, when consumer home projects helped fuel a boom in sales.

This in keeping with our past reporting on the post-quarantine shopping boom that didn’t materialize, or at least, didn’t materialize in a way forecasts had predicted.

For example, consumer spending data released in May found that while people were dining out and buying clothes more often, their appetites were noticeably dimmed when it came to a lot of larger-ticket purchases such as cars and electronics, with motor vehicles and auto part sales dipping 3.7 percent and electronics/appliance sales dropping 3.4 percent.