Retail Sales sub-Indices

Along with the All Business and All Business excluding Motor Trades the CSO’s Retail Sales Index provides 13 sub-indices.  Here are the seasonally adjusted monthly and annual changes for each of these sub-indices by volume and value for February.
Clicking any of the titles under the ‘Sub-Index’ heading will bring up a graph showing the values of the sub-index for the past three years, with the associated annual and monthly changes, as well as the weighting given to each sub-index in the overall Retail Sales Index for each month.

Sub-Index	Volume		Value
	Monthly	Annual	Monthly	Annual
Motor Trades	+34.5%	+30.5%	+37.2%	+26.7%
Non-Specialised Stores	-1.9%	-1.7%	-3.9%	-7.4%
Department Stores	+6.3%	+10.9%	+2.3%	-1.2%
Food, Beverages & Tobacco	-2.3%	-5.0%	-3.1%	-11.6%
Fuel	+7.5%	-10.5%	+7.8%	+3.2%
Pharmaceuticals, Medical & Cosmetics	+5.9%	+1.2%	+2.6%	-8.1%
Clothing, Footwear & Textiles	+1.3%	+1.8%	-0.2%	-9.0%
Furniture & Lighting	+14.9%	+4.7%	+13.9%	-3.8%
Hardware, Paint & Glass	+4.8%	-13.2%	+4.0%	-15.5%
Electrical Goods	+3.3%	+3.5%	+4.4%	-4.8%
Books, Newspapers & Stationery	-1.7%	-15.3%	-2.0%	-16.3%
Other Retail Sales	+15.3%	+2.8%	+13.6%	-4.2%
Bars	-2.7%	-10.9%	-2.8%	-13.9%

We can see the very strong performance of the motor trades in February.    Overall there are still plenty of red figures in the table.  This is particularly true for the annual changes by value with 11 of the 13 sub-indices still negative.  Annual volume changes are negative for only six sub-indices.  For six of the sub-indices we are buying more stuff than this time last year but paying less for it. 
The monthly figures have more positive numbers with only four monthly declines by volume and five by value.
The gap between value and volume is most evident in the Department Store sector where sales are up 10.9% by volume but down 1.2% by value over the year.  Click the title above to see the graph.  In the graph the red line represents the volume figures and blue line the value figures.