Chicago Fed Advance Retail Trade Summary (CARTS)
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.

Panel A shows Consumer Edge data with full sample R equal to 0.89 and ex. 2020 R equal 0.54.
Panel B shows Bloomberg Second Measure data with full sample R equal to 0.84 and ex. 2020 R equal to 0.75.
Panel C shows Numerator data with full sample R equal to 0.87 and ex. 2020 R equal to 0.66.
Panel D shows Facteus data with full sample R equal to 0.25 and ex. 2020 R equal to 0.65.
Panel E shows SafeGraph data with full sample R equal to 0.86 and ex. 2020 R equal to 0.66.
Panel F shows Advan data with full sample R equal to 0.88 and ex. 2020 R equal 0.68.
Panel G shows EIA data with full sample R equal to 0.87 and ex. 2020 R equal to 0.46.
Panel H shows Morning Consult data with full sample R equal to 0.58 and ex. 2020 R equal to 0.11.
chart key graphic
Notes: CARTS stands for Chicago Fed Advance Retail Trade Summary. EIA stands for U.S. Energy Information Administration. R is the correlation coefficient between each of the eight data series (the black lines in each panel) that are used as inputs to CARTS—specifically, its Weekly Index of Retail Trade—and the U.S. Census Bureau’s monthly data series on retail & food services sales ex. auto (the same red line in each panel).
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

Chicago Fed Insights | December 4, 2024
In this Chicago Fed Insights article, we provide an update on the Chicago Fed Advance Retail Trade Summary (CARTS). CARTS is a summary measure of multiple high-frequency consumer spending indicators that aims to improve on the timeliness and reliability of traditional measures of U.S. retail spending.

What’s New in CARTS 2.1? Updates to Our Index Tracking National Retail Sales

Chicago Fed Insights | July 15, 2024
In this Chicago Fed Insights article, we provide an update on the Chicago Fed Advance Retail Trade Summary (CARTS). As readers may remember, CARTS debuted in mid-2021. A summary measure of multiple high-frequency indicators of retail sales (including payment card transactions, foot traffic, gas sales, and consumer sentiment), CARTS grew out of pandemic-era research that aimed to improve the timeliness and reliability of traditional measures of U.S. retail spending.

What Was in Your Holiday CARTS? Resuming Our Index Tracking National Retail Spending

Chicago Fed Insights | January 16, 2024
In this Chicago Fed Insights article, we unveil version 2.0 of our Chicago Fed Advance Retail Trade Summary (CARTS) and provide a preview of what it signals for retail spending during the 2023 holiday season in the United States.

Introducing CARTS: A New Index Tracking National Retail Spending

Chicago Fed Insights | July 12, 2021
During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S., the speed with which economic activity responded to the spread of the virus and the public policy responses that followed laid bare the need for both accurate and timely measures of consumer spending. In this Chicago Fed Insights blog post, we discuss a new Chicago Fed index called CARTS and its implications for the high-frequency measurement of consumer spending.

Tracking U.S. Consumers in Real Time with a New Weekly Index of Retail Trade (REVISED November 2021)

Working Papers | March 2021
We create a new weekly index of retail trade that accurately predicts the U.S. Census Bureau's Monthly Retail Trade Survey (MRTS). The index's weekly frequency provides an early snapshot of the MRTS and allows for a more granular analysis of the aggregate consumer response to fast-moving events such as the Covid-19 pandemic. To construct the index, we extract the co-movement in weekly data series capturing credit and debit card transactions, foot traffic, gasoline sales, and consumer sentiment. To ensure that the index is representative of aggregate retail spending, we implement a benchmarking method that uses a mixed-frequency dynamic factor model to constrain the weekly index to match the monthly MRTS. We use the index to document several interesting features of U.S. retail sales during the Covid-19 pandemic, many of which are not visible in the MRTS. In addition, we show that our index would have more accurately predicted the MRTS in real time during the pandemic when compared to either consensus forecasts available, monthly autoregressive models, or other commonly-cited high-frequency data that aims to track retail spending. The gains are substantial, with 50 percent or more reductions in mean absolute forecast errors.
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