U.S. retail sales decline 1.1% in July

Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick breaks down the retail sales numbers for July.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: But let's begin with those retail sales figures for the month of July. Falling a little bit more than expected. Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick joins us now with the details on this data, Emily.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Well, Myles, as you mentioned, a disappointing print on retail sales for last month. US consumer spending pulling back more than anticipated as the effects of those earlier in the year stimulus checks wane further and concerns over the spread of the Delta variant also rose. Now, specifically, we saw retail sales drop by 1.1% in July compared to June, and that's according to the Commerce Department the latest monthly report. And has followed a 0.7% rise in June, and consensus economists were looking for just a 0.3% dip for July.

Now, the big contributor to that July drop in retail sales was in motor vehicle and parts dealer sales. We saw those down by 3.9% for the month, but we should note that they are still up by nearly 16% compared to July 2020. Now, just taking a look at some of the other data that we've gotten recently. Of course, last week's consumer price index. We also saw that prices for used cars and trucks came down, so this does seem to reinforce that that moderation in demand and supply chain issues for motor dealers is taking place here.

Now, a couple of other categories that fell last month. We saw both furniture and home furnishing stores, as well as building material and supply dealer sales down between 6% and 1.2% on the month, consistent with what we saw in Home Depot's quarterly results earlier today. And that company also missing on second quarter comparable same store sales, and, again, pointing to that cool down that we've been seeing in housing market and home improvement activity.

Now, one other category I definitely want to highlight is in non-store retailers or e-commerce platforms, which posted a 3.1% drop in monthly sales. Now, heading into the report this morning, many economists had expected to see a decrease in that category, given that we had Amazon Prime Day occurring a month early in June this year. That did great a little bit of a difficulty when it came to those seasonal adjustments and potentially one of the contributors to that monthly drop.

And then, finally, a couple of categories that contributed positively for the month. We saw miscellaneous for retailers posted 3.5% increase in sales, and food services and drinking places sales were up 1.7%. So still seeing some positive strength here in some of these reopening categories, but overall, a bigger than expected monthly pullback in overall retail sales in July. Guys.