Furniture segment outperforms overall retail in DOC’s June estimates
WASHINGTON — While the furniture and home furnishings category was virtually flat from May to June (down 0.1% from May), June sales were up 4.5% for the category over where it stood in June 2024, according to the Department of Commerce‘s advance monthly estimates.
On the heels of Memorial Day sales, June started the summer in earnest, and the home furnishings category saw and estimated $11.054 billion in sales, up from June 2024’s $10.597 billion.
For the first half of 2025, the category saw sales of $66.465 billion, according to the DOC report, up 5.7% from the same period last year. For the three months April-May-June, the retail segment saw an increase of 5.9% over the same three months in 2024.
See also: Furniture’s growth sharpest in May among all DOC categories
Overall, the entire retail and food services sales were estimated at $713.652 billion, up 3.9% from June 2024’s $688.151 billion. Besides furniture and home furnishings, retail segments that outperformed overall sales included motor vehicle & parts dealers (up 6.5%), health and personal care stores (up 8.3%), miscellaneous store retailers (up 8.5%), non-store retailers (up 4.5%) and food services and drinking places (up 6.6%). Clothing and clothing accessories stores matched retail sales overall, up 3.9%.
Categories that declined year over year were electronics and appliance stores (down 0.2%), building material and garden equipment and suppliers dealers (down 1.1%) and gasoline stations (down 4.4%). Department stores, a subsegment of general merchandise stores, was down 3.6% year over year.
The DOC’s advance estimates are based on a sub-sample of the U.S. Census Bureau’s full retail and food services sample. A stratified random sampling method is used to select approximately 5,500 retail and food services firms whose sales are then weighted and benchmarked to represent the complete universe of more than 3 million retail and food services firms.
