June spending at small retailers increased 8 percent compared to June 2011, according to a SpendingPulse report released today by MasterCard Advisors and Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest small business lender.
This was higher than the overall U.S. retail growth rate of 6.9 percent. The June report also found that sales growth at small retailers has now outperformed growth of overall retail sales for 9 consecutive months, since October 2011.
SpendingPulse is a macroeconomic report that measures U.S. retail sales across a wide number of industry subsectors, as well as in total, delivering information earlier than other data sources. The new reportMasterCard SpendingPulse for Small Business, provides a new view gauging the health of sales within the small retailer segment of the economy, which are retailers with less than $35 million in annual sales and less than 200 employees — most have less than $10 million in annual sales. It offers aggregated information on retail sales trends that small business stakeholders can use to make informed and timely decisions.
“Small retailers account for approximately a third of total retail sales in the U.S., so a detailed understanding of this sector is crucial to understanding the economy as a whole,” said Michael McNamara, Global Solutions Leader, MasterCard SpendingPulse.
“Looking into its historical data, it is helpful to know, for example, that although we’ve seen smaller retailers grow at a higher clip than overall retail over the past 9 months, this follows a period from November 2009-October 2011 when larger retailers had bounced back from the recession more robustly than their smaller counterparts,” McNamara said.
MasterCard SpendingPulse for Small Business is based on aggregate sales activity in the MasterCard payments network, coupled with estimates for all other payment forms, including cash and check.
