AI Analysis: Monthly retail sales, price, and volume, seasonally adjusted

Executive Summary

Canadian retail trade grew substantially from January 2017 to January 2026, with nominal sales rising 40.2% to $70,709M — but roughly half of that gain was driven by price inflation rather than real volume growth, as the Fisher Chained Volume Index rose only 19.3% over the same period. The dataset spans 109 monthly periods across 30 NAICS retail categories, revealing a highly skewed industry structure where a few large segments dominate total sales. The most significant disruption in the entire series occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which produced the sharpest month-over-month swings in retail activity recorded across the nine-year period.

Key Findings

• Nominal retail sales in current prices grew 40.2% from approximately $50,400M to $70,709M between January 2017 and January 2026, outpacing real volume growth of 19.3% — indicating that roughly half the revenue increase is attributable to price inflation.
• The Fisher Chained Price Index rose 17.5% to 118.2 by January 2026, confirming sustained retail price inflation above the 2017 baseline and explaining much of the gap between nominal and real sales growth.
• The dataset is heavily right-skewed, with an overall mean of $6,573M but a median of only $2,306M, reflecting that a small number of large retail categories — such as total retail trade, food & beverage stores, and motor vehicle dealers — dominate average monthly sales.
• The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 caused the most dramatic anomalies in the entire series, producing month-over-month swings with Z-scores exceeding 2.5, first a steep drop then a rapid recovery in retail activity.
• The Fisher Chained Price Index is tightly clustered with a standard deviation of just 6.8 and a range of only 19.9 points (98.7–118.6), indicating relatively gradual and stable price changes across the nine-year period despite cumulative inflation.
• Retail sales in current prices averaged $6,130M per category per month versus $5,611M at 2017 constant prices — a gap of approximately $519M that directly quantifies the average inflation effect embedded in nominal retail figures.
• One statistically significant level outlier was detected in the overall retail sales series (Z-score exceeding 2.0 against a mean of $59,980M and standard deviation of $7,217M), underscoring that extreme deviations from trend are rare outside of pandemic-era disruptions.