The National Retail Federation says the New York Post’s report discrediting its upbeat back-to-school shopping forecast is a case of the paper falling prey to the trendy “retail is dying” narrative, Mark Matthews, vice president of research for the NRF, told me.
The NRF’s annual survey conducted by Prosper Insights and Analytics forecasts total spending for back to school and college combined to reach $83.6 billion, a more than 10% increase from last year’s $75.8 billion.
The New York Post casts doubt on the prediction in its story featuring the headline, “Retail group’s back-to-school projection doesn’t jive with recent numbers,” noting the “carnage of widespread retail bankruptcies, store closings and tumbling sales” befalling the retail sector.
The National Retail Federation predicts that back-to-school and college spending will rise more than... [+]
The paper's skepticism of the NRF’s robust outlook, which was based on surveying 7,226 consumers, “is because we have this ‘retail is dying’ narrative out there,” Matthews said. "So [even] when you publish accurate data in a highly scientific way, it immediately gets dismissed.… We’re not being shills for the retail industry. If the numbers were down, we’d report them down.”
The NRF’s back-to-school spending forecast in part reflects heightened consumer confidence from the macro economic picture, he said. “We’re seeing a lot of discretionary spend,” Matthews said, citing shoes, consumer electronics and food as three particularly healthy areas. “The stock market is at all time high, unemployment is at an all time low.”
The NRF’s forecast is no doubt much rosier than Deloitte’s back-to school-outlook, for one. Deloitte predicts that parents of kids in grades K-12 expect to spend an average of $501 per student on back to school this year, amounting to about $27 billion, which is flat with last year’s numbers.
While the NRF’s outlook reflects back-to-school and back-to-college spending combined, the Deloitte report focuses solely on spending plans for grades K-12.
Despite the NRF’s growth estimate of 10% higher back-to-school spending than in 2016, shoppers are expected to shell out about $50 more per household this season versus last year, “which is not a huge increase by any means,” Matthews said.
