Stuttering High Street Sales Fuel Fears Of Double Dip

[interestrateripoff]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/stuttering-high-street-sales-fuel-fears-of-double-dip-2048042.html

A poor performance by footwear and homewares retailers led to lacklustre sales on the high street last month, reinforcing warnings of a spluttering recovery in consumer spending.

Homewares shops suffered their biggest decline since spring last year, as nervous consumers shied away from big-ticket purchases. The annual rate of underlying retail sales rose by just 0.5 per cent in July, compared with a rate of 1.2 per cent in June, according a survey by British Retail Consortium and accountant KPMG. The overall figure was lifted by a resilient performance from food retailers. Total retail sales rose by 2.6 per cent in July.

Stephen Robertson, the director general of the BRC, warned that one-off boosts to retailers appeared to have gone. "These are poor results for non-food retailing, with some sectors actually seeing sales falls," he said. "The benefit from sunny weather receded as it turned cooler and wetter in parts of the country, while the World Cup boost ended."

Footwear sales slowed again in July, the BRC-KPMG poll found, recording their weakest performance since August 2009. Sales of men's and children's shoes were actually lower than they were last August.

It's the retail sell less recovery.

And it's locked in.

[Laura]

'Double-dip' my knickers! - More like steep decent, level out, hit speed bump, not see cliff edge .............

[MrFlibble]

The double dip was baked in as without the stimulus there was not going to be a recovery. Remove the stimulus and we are back to where we would have been anyway - in recession. The stimulus has actually made matters worse, if nature had been allowed to run its course we would have been further on in the cycle by now and would not have blown tens of billions trying to prevent the unpreventable.

As for housing, we have to unwind one year of gains to get back on track...

[Mega]

I think we on HPC called it right last month, it was the tipping point, now i think we going to start to fall into Xmas. Those thinking of buying will hold fire as they suss "the long we wait, the cheaper it gets".

Mike