Retail sales fell 0.6 percent in July, and eight of the thirteen kinds of business in the table went up
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Most of the table went up.
Eight of the thirteen kinds of business the Census Bureau lists sold more in July than in June. Clothing shops took $527m more. Restaurants and bars took $537m more. Health and personal care, general merchandise, building materials, food and drink shops, furniture and the miscellaneous line all rose as well.
Retail and food services sales still fell 0.6 percent, to $763.6 billion.
Two categories did it
The month on month decline in the seasonally adjusted total is $4,470m. Nonstore retailers, the line that holds online selling, fell $3,148m. Motor vehicle and parts dealers fell $2,560m.
Those two alone come to $5,708m, which is more than the entire decline. The gains everywhere else, and three much smaller falls at filling stations, electronics shops and sporting goods retailers, make up the difference. In percentage terms the online line fell 2.2 percent and the car line 1.8 percent.
That is why the headline and the underlying measures disagree. Excluding motor vehicles and parts, sales fell 0.3 percent. Excluding motor vehicles and gasoline, 0.2 percent. The release marks both of those with the asterisk it uses for changes its own confidence interval cannot separate from zero.
The headline figure carries no asterisk. Down 0.6 percent against a margin of 0.4 points is a real fall by the survey's own test, and it is the first in the three months the release charts. May was up 0.9 percent. June was up 0.2 percent, asterisked.
Against last year the number is still growing
Sales were 5.0 percent higher than in July 2025. Across May to July together, 6.3 percent higher than the same three months a year earlier.
Nothing in this release is adjusted for prices. The Bureau says so on the front page, and it matters for any category where what changed was the price rather than the quantity.
What was revised, and what was not
The May to June change is unrevised at up 0.2 percent.
The levels underneath it are not the same, though. June was published on 16 July as $768.6 billion and appears in the new table at $768.072 billion. May was $766.9 billion and is now $766.192 billion. Both came down by roughly half a billion dollars, and because they moved together the percentage between them did not move at all.
These are advance estimates. The August report is due on 16 September.
