You’ve read the reports about the iPhone 5 contributing up to 0.5% in GDP growth.
But this may be the flipside…
On Friday, August retail sales were disappointingly weak, with “control” sales (excluding gas, auto, etc.) up just 0.1% vs. expectations of 0.4%.
But even within “control” most of the numbers weren’t that bad.
Here’s SocGen:
Excluding reported increases in auto, building materials and gasoline purchases, retail “control” – the portion of the Census Bureau’s report that is used by the Bureau of Economic Analysis to estimate nominal goods spending – was little changed (-0.01%) in August, following a 0.8% pop in July. Within the “control” group, a solid acceleration in restaurant sales (0.5% from 0.3% in July) was countered by a surprising falloff in general merchandise (-0.3%) and electronics (-1.4%) purchases.
Indeed, a look at the table of results shows that the sequential and year-over-year change in electronics was particularly weak.
Weakness could be attributed to general consumer weakness, but when you see food services drinking places sales rising nicely, one wouldn’t presume that consumers are any more stretched than they’ve been recently.
It seems plausible that if the iPhone 5 is going to have such a positive impact on the economy, then the much-hyped device may have been a drag on electronics spending (as everyone saved up for the biggest consumer electronics release in history) during the month before the launch.