As I noted in a pre-Christmas post, "The desperation is palpable at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, over how the Christmas shopping season is going."
Desperation has clearly descended into outright deception at the wire service, where an unbylined story claims that spending is up 8 percent, but that the source involved "does not include spending by dollar amounts." As will be shown shortly, this is a clear attempt to make this year's Christmas shopping season look more than twice as good as it was expected to be.
In the article below, the red asterisks I have added are clear reference to dollar amounts, or would be understood by most readers to refer to dollar amounts:
Twice in the headline and in six instances during the first three paragraphs, the AP report refers to "spending" or "sales." Both are terms which are commonly (and correctly) understood to involve dollar amounts.
Finally, in Paragraph 4, as underlined in red, the AP admits that MasterCard is counting transactions and not dollars, and, as underlined in green, that the incurably optimistic National Retail Federation is predicting a sales increase of less than half the headlined 8 percent. As I noted before Christmas, there's strong reason to believe that the final authentic figure will come in well below the NRF's prediction.
Adding insult to injury, the AP refers again to the MasterCard transaction-based report in Paragraph 5 — and still pretends to be talking about the dollar volume of sales.
The AP itself should know that an increase in the number of transactions won't translate into an equivalent percentage increase in sales volume this year, because the wire service's own Joyce Rosenberg told us so on December 23:
... (Americans are) becoming more open to buying gifts that in the past might have been considered downright cheap. So, they're not just looking for big discounts on extravagant, expensive designer and brand name goods; they're starting out with the intention of getting less expensive items that they might not have considered buying as gifts in the past.
... The growing willingness of holiday shoppers to spend less on gifts has made storeowners more conservative as they've stocked up for the holidays. Many have more lower-priced merchandise on their shelves to cater to the growing prevalence of cheap-gift buyers.
I also confirmed one other salient point in a conversation with Britt Beemer at America's Research Group this afternoon: Because of gift cards, "spending" does not equal "sales." A gift card does not create a sale until it is used to buy something. Therefore, even if AP had geniune "spending" stats from MasterCard, it wouldn't have told us anything about holiday "sales," because gift cards are part of "spending."
It would be tempting to dive into more detail here, but it's not necessary.
The real point here is that the nation's de facto gatekeeping new service has deliberately published a report which it should know hasn't demonstrated anything. In other words, there's absolutely no story here — only an excuse to present a nice, big shiny number to distract attention from how lousy the past Christmas shopping season probably was.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
