Historical data.

• Author: Maley, Frank
• Position: UPFRONT

By now, alert readers may have noticed an amazing consistency in the retail-sales numbers we run in our NC Trend section. They've been so consistent that, in fact, they haven't changed for going on five months now. It's not that we have forgotten about them or have some superstitious attachment to last September's figures for taxable retail sales. They just haven't been updated by the state Department of Revenue.

One of the difficulties in compiling a section that draws statistics from so many different places each month is that occasionally, maybe once or twice a year, one of our sources falls behind and fails to get us updates in time to make our deadline. To preserve continuity, we grit our teeth and run the latest numbers we have, even if that means occasionally repeating the information. We usually don't have to do that more than once.

Since its premiere issue in October 1981, BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA has used retail sales statewide--and since 1985, in selected cities--to gauge consumer spending. The Department of Revenue has long been slower than most agencies and companies that contribute information for the NC Trend section, but we learned to live with that--as long as we could predict how far behind its data would be.

Alas, we can no longer do that. Worse, it can no longer do that. We first ran the September sales figures from its October report in our March issue, when most of our other sources already had given us their December figures. Since then, there have been no updates. But because it is such an important economic indicator, we kept taxable retail sales in its spot--waiting for the data to start flowing again.

I asked the guy who oversees crunching those numbers for the Revenue...