United States Redbook Index

The Redbook Index is a weekly report that tracks how much money US retailers are taking in, compared to the same week a year earlier. It focuses on "same-store sales," meaning it only counts stores that have been open for at least a year, so the numbers reflect actual changes in consumer spending rather than growth from a company simply opening new locations.

The index is built by surveying a sample of large general-merchandise retailers, then combining their reported sales figures into a single weighted number. "Weighted" means bigger retailers count for more in the total than smaller ones, since the goal is to approximate real spending patterns across the whole sample rather than treat every store as equally important. The sample is large enough that it is meant to stand in for a big chunk of overall US retail activity, and it is published far more often, and much faster, than the government's official retail sales data.

Because it comes out weekly rather than monthly, traders and economists use it as an early, rougher read on consumer spending trends before slower official data arrives. It measures a retail "week" running Sunday through Saturday, and when weeks are combined into monthly figures, each week is given equal weight regardless of how many days of that week fall in a given calendar month.

The nuance that trips people up: this is a private, survey-based estimate, not a government statistic, so it can be revised, is subject to sampling quirks, and will not perfectly match the official Commerce Department retail sales report when that later data arrives. It is a leading indicator and a proxy, not a precise measurement.