Just how ^(*^&)&^_) stupid do they think we are?

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Okay so either I am an absolute idiot, or haven't had enough coffee this morning, but for the life of me I can't make any sense of today's retail sales data...especially the part about autos.

We see that "car dealers suffered a 2.8% drop in sales in April, adding to the .5% drop in March".

So what is wrong with that you ask. Well try this...


"April auto sales slump as truck sales plunge".

Sales at Detroit's Big 3 of General Motors Corp (GM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Ford Motor Co (F.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Chrysler LLC CBS.UL -- with their truck-heavy lineups -- were worse than expected, according to data released on Thursday. GM sales fell 23 percent, Ford 19 percent, and Chrysler nearly 30 percent.

Asian competitors also struggled, with Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T: Quote, Profile, Research)(TM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) posting a 5 percent sales decline, and Nissan Motor Co (7201.T: Quote, Profile, Research)(NSANY.O: Quote, Profile, Research) sales dropping almost 2 percent.

The only car makers that did not post a sales drop greater than 2.8% were Nissan down 2% and Honda up 6%.

So unless someone has another way of calculating an average that I don't know about, how do you get -23%, -30%, -19%, -5%, -2%, and +6% to average to -2.8%, unless Honda is selling half of all the vehicles. Then add in that sales of lower prices small cars soared and higher priced trucks dropped and the average sales price probably dropped quite significantly too.

So...again..how do car sales only drop 2.8%???

Any thoughts ... because this has me really messed up.

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I don't know

Submitted by on

I went looking to find the raw data, spread sheets, anything and I cannot find this. Unfortunately our numbers wonk is out until Sept. (Charles McMillion). but I did find 2006 article talking about manipulation of retail sales figures.

My quess is there is "seasonal adjustment" to some sort of inflation manipulation to get that low numbers when it sure looks to me like auto sales indeed took a nose dive.

I also know that auto financing is now harder to get and repos, people cannot make their car payments has had a massive increase.

Anybody know if/where the actual raw stats are posted, this should get interesting.

Maybe the trouble is they know we're not so dumb so getting the raw stats they make more impossible.