Retail sales plunge a record 8.7 percent in March

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, retail sales just experienced the biggest plunge on record.

The Commerce Department said Wednesday that retail sales in March dropped 8.7 percent, Reuters reports. This is the biggest decline since the data started being tracked in 1992. In February, retail sales fell a revised 0.4 percent. Though a big decline was expected in a month in which businesses around the country were forced to close down to the coronavirus pandemic, the number was even worse than the 8.0 percent that economists were anticipating.

"We knew the drop in March retail sales would be ugly, but it is still stunning to see," The Washington Post's Heather Long tweeted.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

Previously, the biggest monthly decline in retail sales was in the fall of 2008, when there was a drop of almost 4 percent, The New York Times reports. The Post notes clothing stores took a particularly big hit with sales falling 50.7 percent last month compared to a year ago.

Unemployment claims recently soared past 16 million in three weeks after another 6.6 million filings in the most recent report. This once again shattered the record for most unemployment filings in a single week, which was previously 695,000.

CNN's Julia Chatterley called these numbers "nothing like we've ever seen before," adding this shows that "when the U.S. economy effectively shuts down, so do consumers." But Chatterley warned that since most non-essential businesses didn't start shutting down until halfway through the month, "as bad as this March number is, April is going to be worse."