Advanced retail sales for January 2010 increased 0.5%. The December change was revised upward to -0.1% from -0.3%.

As one can see, retail sales simply have not recovered to pre-recession levels. This implies demand is still a major problem, when we keep getting supply side economic policies. (no direct jobs program as an example).

Gas prices caused a 29% sales increase for the 2009 year. So the 4.3% increase for the year implies 1.25% of that is just gasoline sales, which implies gas prices rose. Non-store retail sales increased 12.4% for the year.

About the only thing one can say is the cliff diving earlier has stopped. Looking over the sales categories one gets the impression that consumers cut spending on any item they could live without as an overall theme to the yearly data.