{"id":1673285,"date":"2014-03-25T12:34:22","date_gmt":"2014-03-25T19:34:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/03\/25\/retail-sales-slow-in-march-for-uk-merchants\/"},"modified":"2014-03-25T12:34:22","modified_gmt":"2014-03-25T19:34:22","slug":"retail-sales-slow-in-march-for-uk-merchants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/03\/25\/retail-sales-slow-in-march-for-uk-merchants\/","title":{"rendered":"Retail sales slow in March for UK merchants"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the U.K., the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/Solutions\" target=\"_self\" class=\"dnautolink\">retail industry<\/a> has seen four months of continuous growth, but the latest report showed that sales dipped slightly in March. The Confederation of British Industry&#039;s Distributive Trades Survey revealed that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbi.org.uk\/media-centre\/press-releases\/2014\/03\/retail-sales-continue-to-grow-but-at-slower-pace-cbi\/\">the sales balance dipped to +13&nbsp;percent<\/a>&nbsp;growth, the lowest it had been since November, which is a stark contrast to February during which time sales reached their highest point since June 2012.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The pace of growth has slowed, likely in part down to the later timing of Mother&#039;s Day and Easter this year,&quot; said Barry Williams, the chair of the CBI Distributive Trades Survey Panel and chief <a href=\"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/Solutions\" target=\"_self\" class=\"dnautolink\">merchandising<\/a>&nbsp;officer for food at Asda, a British supermarket chain owned by Wal-Mart.<\/p>\n<p>According to Reuters, analysts had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2014\/03\/25\/britain-retail-cbi-idUSL5N0MM2IP20140325\">predicted a slight drop from February&#039;s +37<\/a> to +28&nbsp;percent growth, but the actual numbers fell rather short of these expectations. Fortunately, experts are predicting an uptick in sales for April that should bring the numbers back to about +36 percent and on par with February. RTT&nbsp;News reported that this would be the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rttnews.com\/2291452\/u-k-retail-sales-grow-less-than-forecast.aspx?type=alleco\">largest amount of month-over-month growth<\/a> since December 2010, indicating that the U.K. marketplace continues to recover from the recent recession.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the U.K., the retail industry has seen four months of continuous growth, but the latest report showed that sales dipped slightly in March. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/03\/25\/retail-sales-slow-in-march-for-uk-merchants\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":1673286,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1673285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-specialty-retail-industry-trends"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1673285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1673286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1673285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1673285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.retailpro.com\/News\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1673285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}