WASHINGTON — Most of the extra money American shoppers spent in September went into their gas tanks. Retail and food services sales rose 0.8 percent from August to $745.0 billion, the Census Bureau said on Thursday, but sales at gasoline stations jumped 6.4 percent, and without them the total rose just 0.2 percent.
TEH’s arithmetic from Table 1 of the release puts a figure on it. Of the $5.7 billion monthly increase in seasonally adjusted sales, $4.07 billion came from gasoline stations, about 71 percent. It fits the September CPI inflation report a day earlier, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics said gasoline rose 9.1 percent in September and accounted for over half of the monthly increase in consumer prices.
That is the catch in the headline. The figures are adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences “but not for price changes,” the Census Bureau said, so a dearer gallon and a fuller tank look identical in the data. The BLS put overall consumer prices up 0.6 percent in September, which means much of a 0.8 percent rise in dollars may be price rather than purchases.
Away from the pump the picture was uneven. Restaurants and bars rose 1.1 percent, furniture stores 1.3 percent and electronics and appliance stores 0.6 percent. Clothing stores were flat. General merchandise stores slipped 0.1 percent and building material and garden dealers fell 0.6 percent. Online and other nonstore retailers, at $124.3 billion, gained 0.3 percent.
The estimate is an advance one, built from a sample of about 4,800 firms, and the Census Bureau puts the margin of error on the monthly change at plus or minus 0.4 percent. It revised its monthly series on September 28, so dollar levels differ from earlier reports, and it raised August’s gain to 1.3 percent from 1.1 percent. Over twelve months, total sales were up 6.3 percent and gasoline stations 28.1 percent, while the total excluding gasoline stations was up 4.5 percent, according to the Census Bureau release.
Pump prices remain high even though they “have cooled slightly in recent weeks,” CBS News reported, with AAA putting the national average at $4.33 a gallon on Wednesday.
Stations may not be done raising them. In the BLS’s September producer prices report, gasoline at the producer level jumped 20.3 percent while margins for automotive fuels and lubricants retailing dropped 30.3 percent, a gap that suggests sellers absorbed part of the increase.
The Federal Reserve, which raised rates for the first time since 2023 in September, meets again on October 27-28, according to its calendar.
The release does not say how much of the gasoline-station gain was higher prices and how much was more gallons, and that split is what would show whether households are buying more or merely paying more.
