About CARTS
CARTS combines eight weekly indicators for retail sales (including payment card transactions, retail foot traffic, gasoline sales, and consumer sentiment) with the U.S. Census Bureau’s monthly data on retail & food services sales excluding motor vehicles and parts (ex. auto) in a time-consistent fashion. The result is a Weekly Index of Retail Trade that, when aggregated to a monthly frequency, matches the available Census Bureau data.
The figure below shows the latest seasonally adjusted month-over-month (log) percent changes in these eight weekly time series. The top left corners of each panel contain correlation coefficients (R) between each of these data series and the Census Bureau’s monthly data series on retail & food services sales ex. auto for the full sample and excluding the year 2020 (ex. 2020). By construction, this correlation coefficient is 1 for the Weekly Index of Retail Trade.









Sources: Authors’ calculations based on data from Haver Analytics, Consumer Edge, Bloomberg Second Measure, Numerator, Facteus, SafeGraph, Advan Research, and Morning Consult.
For more details on CARTS v. 2.2, see the recent Chicago Fed Insights article. Later this year, we will update the accompanying Chicago Fed Working Paper No. 2021-05 as well. The current version of the working paper serves as legacy documentation for CARTS v. 1.0.
More on CARTS
Tracking Holiday Spending with CARTS 2.2 and a New Dashboard
What’s New in CARTS 2.1? Updates to Our Index Tracking National Retail Sales
What Was in Your Holiday CARTS? Resuming Our Index Tracking National Retail Spending
Introducing CARTS: A New Index Tracking National Retail Spending
Tracking U.S. Consumers in Real Time with a New Weekly Index of Retail Trade (REVISED November 2021)
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