Americans spent at a brisk pace in August, defying economists’ expectations for a contraction in U.S. retail sales, though much of the spending was online as the spread of the Delta variant may have kept people from heading out to shop in greater numbers.
Retail and food services sales rose 0.7 percent in August after falling by 1.8 percent in July, according to an advance estimate from the Census Bureau (pdf). Consensus forecasts cited by FXStreet predicted a 0.8 percent drop in the retail sales number.
