The July Retail Sales Table, Mapped Line by Line to Next Week's Four Reporters

by Leah Avraham · August 14, 2026

Previews Correspondent, Earnings Dispatch

The Census Bureau put July advance retail and food services sales at $763.6 billion this morning, down 0.6% from June with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.4 percentage points, and up 5.0% from July 2025 with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.5 points. Excluding motor vehicles and parts, sales fell 0.3%; excluding motor vehicles and gasoline, they fell 0.2%. Home Depot holds its second-quarter earnings call at 9 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, Aug. 18; Target and Lowe's both report on Wednesday, Aug. 19, Target's call scheduled for 8 a.m. Eastern and Lowe's for 9 a.m.; Walmart releases results before the open on Thursday, Aug. 20. All four dates are taken from the companies' own investor-relations announcements. This newsroom argued yesterday that the macro print cannot tell you what those four will comp. That remains true. What the print can do is tell you which specific lines in the Census table are the ones those four companies live in, and this month those lines and the headline disagree.

Start with the footnote, because it is attached to the opposite number from the one people will quote. The report carries an asterisk reading, in full, "The 90 percent confidence interval includes zero. There is insufficient statistical evidence to conclude that the actual change is different from zero." In this release that marker sits on the May-to-June change of 0.2%, which came through unrevised, and not on July's minus 0.6%. A 0.6-point decline against a 0.4-point band clears its own error bar. The 0.2% gain that everyone treated in June as evidence of a resilient consumer never did. The month that got read as growth is the statistically ambiguous one; the month being read as a stall is the one Census will stand behind.

Against forecasts, July was a genuine miss rather than a rounding problem. Continuum Economics, in a preview published ahead of the release, looked for the headline to come in unchanged on the month, ex-autos to rise 0.2% and the ex-autos-and-gasoline measure to rise 0.4%, calling for some loss of momentum but continued resilience. All three landed below that. InvestingLive's release wrap had the market positioned for a 0.1% headline gain and a 0.3% rise in the control group that feeds the GDP consumption arithmetic, and put the control group's actual at minus 0.4% — on that outlet's reading, the first negative print on that measure since September 2025. No preview this newsroom has read looked for a headline with a minus sign in front of it.

Now the mapping, starting with the two home-improvement reporters. Building material and garden equipment dealers, the Census category that contains Home Depot and Lowe's, rose 0.3% on the month and 6.7% from a year earlier, one of the strongest annual gains in the table. Furniture and home furnishings, an adjacent read on the same housing-linked demand, also rose 0.3% on the month but was down 1.2% year over year. Both chains carry the same shape of guidance into next week: Home Depot reaffirmed fiscal 2026 comparable sales of flat to up 2.0% alongside total sales growth of approximately 2.5% to 4.5% and an operating margin of approximately 12.4% to 12.6% — 12.8% to 13.0% on an adjusted basis — after a first quarter in which comps rose 0.6% and U.S. comps rose 0.4%. Lowe's affirmed comparable sales of flat to up 2% and adjusted diluted EPS of approximately $12.25 to $12.75 on sales of $92.0 billion to $94.0 billion, after a first quarter comp of 0.6% on $23.1 billion of sales. TIKR put the Street at roughly $47 billion of revenue and around $4.73 in adjusted EPS for Home Depot's Tuesday report, against $4.68 a year earlier.

The caution on that line is that the category is much wider than the two chains. Building material and garden equipment dealers takes in independent lumberyards, regional garden centers and specialty hardware, all of which report into Census and none of which report to Wall Street. It also counts every establishment, new and old, while a comparable-sales number by construction excludes stores that have not been open long enough to comp. A category that grows because there are more stores in it is not the same thing as a comp.

For the two general-merchandise reporters the read is flatter. General merchandise stores rose 0.3% on the month and 3.7% year over year, with department stores inside that group up 0.1% and 2.5% respectively. Food and beverage stores, the grocery line that matters most to Walmart's mix, were unchanged on the month. Two categories did better than either: clothing and accessories rose 1.9%, the largest monthly gain in the table, and health and personal care rose 0.7%, both of which touch Target's assortment without defining it. Target enters the quarter having raised, guiding to net sales growth in a range around 4% and to GAAP and adjusted EPS near the high end of a $7.50 to $8.50 range after a first quarter comp of 5.6% built on 4.4% comparable traffic growth. Walmart guided fiscal 2027 net sales growth of 3.5% to 4.5% in constant currency and adjusted EPS of $2.75 to $2.85, after Walmart U.S. comps excluding fuel of 4.1% and 26% global eCommerce growth; a Barchart preview carried by Yahoo Finance put the consensus for next Thursday at $0.74 per share, up 8.8% from $0.68 a year earlier.

The worst line in the table is also the one most likely to be misread as a demand signal. Nonstore retailers fell 2.2% on the month, the steepest monthly decline of any category. That line was still up 7.7% from a year earlier. The calendar explains most of the gap: Amazon ran Prime Day 2026 from June 23 through June 26, four days entirely inside the June reference month, after moving the event out of July. July is the payback month, and a payback month with a 7.7% annual growth rate underneath it is not a consumer rolling over.

There is a second reason not to run the nonstore line straight into Walmart's or Target's digital comps. The Census Bureau's own survey FAQ says that "Generally, e-commerce divisions of brick-and-mortar companies would be included in electronic shopping and mail-order houses as long as they do not fulfill e-commerce orders from their stores." The conditional clause does the work. Store fulfillment — ship-from-store, curbside, same-day pickup — is central to how both Walmart and Target describe their digital businesses, and orders filled that way are not sitting in the nonstore line that fell 2.2%. Whatever those two report next week for digital growth, this category is not the control group for it.

Card data collected independently of Census points the same way. Bank of America Institute's Consumer Checkpoint, published Aug. 11 and therefore built without the benefit of this morning's release, had total card spending per household down 0.2% in July on a seasonally adjusted monthly basis and up 5.0% from a year earlier, down from 6.3% in June; excluding gasoline, the annual rate was 4.3%. The Institute tied much of the moderation to temporary factors rather than to a break in underlying demand, naming a timing mismatch in online promotions that pulled purchases into June this year, the fading of World Cup-related spending after a June peak, and swings in gasoline prices. Its headline finding is arguably more relevant to next week than the monthly delta: spending growth across income cohorts has largely converged, with lower-income households at 5.4% year over year now running close to middle-income households at 4.9%, and only the top 5% of earners still clearly outpacing the rest. Trade-down and cohort divergence have been standing themes on Walmart's and Target's calls. That framing is now being challenged by the card data.

None of this settles what the four companies will print. It does set the questions. For Home Depot and Lowe's, the industry line their category sits in grew in July and has grown 6.7% over the year, so a soft comp next week is a share or a ticket problem rather than a category problem. For Target and Walmart, general merchandise grew slightly and grocery did not grow at all, which puts the weight on traffic and on the composition of the comp rather than on the top line. And the loudest number in this morning's release, the 2.2% drop in nonstore, belongs to a category shaped by an event that moved a month. One more item sits between the print and the prints: the minutes of the July 28-29 FOMC meeting, at which the committee held the target range at 3.50% to 3.75% by a 9-3 vote with Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan dissenting in favor of a quarter-point hike, are released at 2 p.m. Eastern on Aug. 19, the same day Target and Lowe's report.