“This decision is based on discussions with many of our investors and is consistent with the practice of the vast majority of our retail peers,” said John Mulligan, the discounter’s chief financial officer. “We believe aligning our sales guidance and reporting with disclosure of our quarterly financial results will create a longer-term focus and provide greater understanding of our sales results in the context of our overall financial performance.”

Industry watchers beg to differ.

“Retailers have moved to less transparency when things are tougher,” said International Council of Shopping Centers chief economist Michael Niemira, who has been compiling monthly same-store sales figures since the 1980s. “You don’t see them stopping when things are good. That’s typically when you start to worry. You get less reliable information. It’s less information out there to really understand the retail environment.”

Based on his tally, the pool of retailers reporting will shrink to 21 after Target drops out, from an average of 78 in 2004. Retailers started reporting monthly sales as far back as at least the 1950s, and moved on to report them on a comparable basis, which excludes results from newly opened or closed stores, in the 1980s amid a big wave of new store openings, Niemira said.

With fewer retailers reporting, “the figure becomes less comprehensive,” he said. “The question is whether the remaining stores correlate with the broader trends. As you start to lose the bigger store[s], it becomes less useful. The data are important [information] on the consumer.”

So far, Niemira said he’ll continue to start compiling the monthly index as his research showed the performance of the remaining retailers reporting still correlates with the overall industry sales figures and government data.

“When we lost Wal-Mart (in 2009), we kept questioning” whether we should compile the data still, he said. The answer: he went back to look at the figures for 10 years and compare the sales trend with and without Wal-Mart’s numbers. “The trend still seems to be broad based,” he said, referring to a significant correlation he found at the time. “You’ll still monitor monthly numbers as store-specific issues. The question is does it have more ramification for the industry as a whole?”

Thomson Reuters analyst Jharonne Martis said she also plans to continue to compile the index. The pool of companies she tracks, which is slightly different from Niemira\’s, will shrink to 18 retailers from 68 in 2005, The monthly comparable sales give us “more visibility of the company,” she said.

However, time will tell if some retailers will change their mind. Macy’s Inc.
, after stopping monthly reporting in early 2008, said later that year it would being reporting again, even though the language it used was “temporarily” reinstating monthly sales reporting.

\”We want to provide investors as much information and transparency as possible,\” said Chief Executive Terry J. Lundgren at the time. \”While we continue to believe that sales on a monthly basis are an incomplete and sometimes misleading measure of a retailer\’s performance, we will again provide this information so investors have a sense of the direction of our business on a more frequent basis through this uncertain time.\”

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