Cyber Monday blues

I haven't had a rant about the abysmal quality of most business reporting in the media for quite a while, but a piece in today's Toronto Star about how Cyber Monday panned out in the US is just too confusing to let pass. You can only find it in the print edition, so you'll have to trust me when I tell you I'm quoting it verbatim. The oddest thing about it is that it's not written by one of the Star's own multi-tasking reporters, but by someone at Bloomberg, who ought to know better.

OK, ready?  The headline is "Web based purchases stall despite discounts".  

That's not good then, is it?  Sales were unchanged from last year?  Well, no. Here's the first sentence from the body of the text:

"Internet holiday shopping in the US rose 8.7% on Cyber Monday...."

So when you said "stalled" you actually mean they rose? Or do you?  Let's finish the sentence....

"slowing from the same time frame last year as consumers spread their online purchases over more days".

Ah.  So when you say they rose, you actually mean they fell?  Or do you?  Let's move on to the second sentence:

"While sales Monday -- typically the busiest day for web shopping -- had increased as of 3 pm in New York, the growth wasn't as fast as last year, when sales had jumped 18.7% in the same period, according to IBM Corp". 

So when you say "stalled" or "slowed" you don't actually mean that sales were the same as last year's, let alone lower.  You just mean they didn't rise as fast as they did last year. In fact, you maybe don't even mean that: the reference to spreading purchases "over more days" almost certainly means that online shopping over the whole manic weekend was very healthy indeed.  We won't actually know until the Commerce Department comes out with proper data for the whole US for the whole month -- not just up to 3 pm in New York on one particular day! -- so it's to be hoped and expected that the Fed won't be taking too much notice of this particular report.

Let's skip by the rest of the article (I'm sparing you an odd little reference to a $4000 Chanel handbag) and look at the final paragraph, one that strongly suggests that the writer doesn't spend much time thinking about statistics:

"Holiday shopping is key for retailers -- with sales in November and December accounting for about 19 percent of annual revenue according to the US National Retail Federation -- and more of that is shifting online".

It's well-known that the final two months of the year are crucial for retailers, but does that percentage seem right to you?  I mean, November and December account for 16.67 percent of the year by daycount, so if sales really are concentrated in those months, they should surely account for more than 19% of annual revenues, right? But there's no sign that our intrepid reporter questioned that. Guess that's why you need bloggers.