Thursday, December 12, 2013

The Retail Employment Abyss

The following chart shows the year over year percentage change in retail sales per retail sales employee. It is not adjusted for inflation.


Click to enlarge.

“There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.” - H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing on the Doorstep

No sarcasm this time, just pure horror.

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart

5 comments:

Troy said...

I've updated my demographic analysis with some graphing, here:

http://patrick.net/forum/?p=1235289#latest

Kinda interesting to see the future. Funny how the press doesn't really cover this stuff all that well, if at all.

Knowledge, who needs it when we've got brides pushing their new husbands off hilltops.

Troy said...

Oops, slightly better link:

http://patrick.net/forum/?p=1235289

Stagflationary Mark said...

Troy,

Knowledge, who needs it when we've got brides pushing their new husbands off hilltops.

Ha! If looks could kill, I think my ex-wife would have pushed me off at least a hundred times before she left, lol.

After she left, I asked her what her biggest complaint was. She wanted more children than me. By that point, I was just so thankful we didn't have any yet! Go figure.

Demographics for the win! Whew! ;)

gdd9000 said...

Um, well, this is interesting, but had you followed through, it could have been more interesting. The reality of the behavior of retailers regarding employment is that they don't start reducing headcount until nominal sales actually start to decline. Then they cut enough to keep retail sales per employee rising for a period of time, before they can't squeeze out much more, and then the sales per employee number actually starts to fall if the drop in retail sales is large enough. But the growth in retail sales per employee lingers on well after the employment number starts to fall. At least in the last iteration/recession. Typically, in a non super-heinous recession, you can pull off that little balancing act long enough to keep sales per employee slowly growing all the way through, but not last time around.

Taking it to the next step, you can plot out nominal retail sales YOY vs real disposable personal income YOY, and easily see what is causing retail sales growth to choppily head downhill since early 2011.

And of course, this comes from fairly constant job growth, falling interest income, hourly earnings that are barely keeping up with inflation, etc.

So basically, the whole thing is rolling over, and if the jobs number keeps effin up like it has lately, due to the overstocking of inventories all last year, and the potential for weaker global demand if the emerging markets crisis keeps at it, well, um, yeah, then WASS.

Stagflationary Mark said...

gdd9000,

So basically, the whole thing is rolling over, and if the jobs number keeps effin up like it has lately, due to the overstocking of inventories all last year, and the potential for weaker global demand if the emerging markets crisis keeps at it, well, um, yeah, then WASS.

That's a pretty good summary of the risks and the potential outcome, not that many investors seem to care. Go figure.