“Wet weather in December will inevitably attract some of the blame,” ING’s James Smith wrote Friday.

Smith was editorializing around an absolutely abysmal read on retail sales in the UK.

The month-to-month decline, a remarkable 3.2%, was the biggest drop since January of 2021 when, as ONS helpfully reminded macro observers, the economy was throttled by tighter COVID curbs nationwide.

Consensus expected a 0.5% decline. So, the actual print counted as a wild miss.

In addition to soggy weather, it appears “some” consumers pulled forward spending to November. Black Friday was popular this year, apparently.

Non-food store sales dropped nearly 4% in volume terms last month, the data showed. “Part of the fall… was because of consumers purchasing gifts earlier than usual,” retailers said. Sales at department, clothing, and household stores rose 2.7% in November.

Do note: Some of the pull-forward was indicative of stretched household budgets. So, it wasn’t all opportunistic deal-hunting tied to discounting.

ONS cited a survey which showed that from late November through December 10, nearly half of adults in the UK planned to spend less on Christmas presents and food, with nearly four in 10 saying they bought holiday food or gifts earlier in an effort to “spread the cost.”

For 2023 as a whole, retail sales volumes fell 2.8% in the UK. That, on the heels of a 3.4% drop in 2022.

Annual sales volumes now sit at their lowest since 2018. “All main sectors fell between 2022 and 2023,” ONS noted.

Friday’s figures came just two days after CPI data showed inflation unexpectedly rose last month in the UK. Collapsing retail sales and elevated inflation isn’t an especially fortuitous combination.

Who knows, maybe it’s a quirk. “In reality, the consumer backdrop is starting to improve and that’s hard to square with the scale of December’s decline,” ING’s Smith went on. “We suspect much of the loss will be recovered in January/February.”