Nonstore sales will surpass motor vehicles sales as soon as next month.
What Are Nonstore Sales?
“Non-store sales” (often written as nonstore retail sales) is a business term that refers to retail transactions made outside of a traditional, physical brick-and-mortar storefront.
This method of retail relies on other channels to connect with buyers:
- E-commerce: Online marketplaces, websites, and direct-to-consumer (DTC) web stores.
- Direct Selling: Direct-to-home selling, catalog sales, and mail orders.
- Automated Retail: Vending machines and kiosks.
- Remote Sales: Telemarketing and TV/streaming shopping networks.
The biggest nonstore retailer is Amazon.
Nominal Advance Retail Sales – Motor Vehicles vs Nonstore
Sales in Millions of Dollars
- Nonstore: 139,965
- Motor Vehicles and Parts: 140,261
Spotlight Department Store Spending
Spending Percentages
- Nonstore Sales: 18.27 percent
- Motor Vehicles and Parts: 18.37 percent
- Department Stores: 1.47 percent
Department store spending is so irrelevant the BLS stopped gathering data in March of 2025.
Advance Retail sales food and Beverage Stores vs Food Services
Where Food Spending Goes
- Food and Beverage Stores: 85,555
- Food Services: 100,953
Spending on food eating out (not counting tips) surpassed spending on eating at home in April of 2022.
Where the BLS Says Food Spending Goes
The BLS weighs food at home at 8.235 percent of the CPI with food away from home at 5.277 percent.
The total weight of food is 13.512 percent.
The food and beverage store weight should be ((85,555 / (85,555 +100,953)) * 0.13512 = 6.200 percent.
The food services weight should be ((100,953 / (85,555 +100,953)) * 0.13512 = 7.313 percent.
The BLS includes taxes but not tips in these calculations so their weights are very far off. Since the price of food away from home is rising much faster, the BLS is way undercounting food inflation.
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Pictures show the answer is shockingly little.
I see friggin insurance is going up again! Unrelenting backdoor inflation hikes.
The BLS needs to start over from scratch. Bureaucracy has made them untrustworthy, and hence detrimental.
If I could do without a car I would happily… but I like living far from town.
I hate getting in my truck, and manage to do so only about twice a month.
Cars and commuting are a terrible way to spend your money and life.
Mamdani wanted to make it free to ride the bus in NYC. L.A. is spread out and public transportation has been rather inconvenient to get around town. A limited number of people can work from home.
Not surprised Mike’s report indicates the diminishing importance of car sales. The average transaction price is just a hair beneath $50,000. (Yikes) Listeners tell me the surveillance tech in the new models has them looking at keeping older models on the road. There’s the “compliance crapification” of tiny 4 and sometimes 3-cylinder engines turbocharged to the max to push around bloated vehicles. (Which end up blowing up at low mileages) It’s getting harder to justify the purchase. A paid for vehicle is a real gift these days. Some will say “used cars nickle and dime you to death”. Not NEARLY the massive drain of the modern vehicle. (Our youngest vehicle is 16 years old, the oldest is 44) The regulatory state is killing the automotive world. Trump’s executive orders are only temporary. The real need to rip the regulatory state out by the roots is apparently too hard to accomplish?
Let’s not discount the risk of some random moron murdering you out of rage, stupidity or inattention.
I to drive cars forever. General maintenance observation. Newer cars ( say 10 years old ) ish are designed to need less maintenance but are harder to work on when they break. Part of the reason is more complicated with computers and such. Myself and my buddies are getting better though. Youtube scan tools are a help. Ai is prob gonna become a help. I keep bees and had an ai q and a with ai on google about small hive beetle. Seem to have the answers to my questions.
Cars 5 years and younger im not so sure about I know direct injection might be an issue maintenance wise.
Are you saying cars aren’t important in the economy? can’t something be both important AND scarce due to costs/supplies/politics? There are sub 20k cheap Chinese EVs that are illegal here in the US.
That we need the state’s approval to buy the vehicle “We” might want should outrage a free people.
That the government is preventing superior vehicles from being sold in the US to support badly managed companies should outrage a few “free market” people.
You mean politicians who need votes.
I would suggest those % amounts flip entirely in the other direction. I see department stores staying just as stagnant. Malls and department stores were gone awhile ago, it just took time for it all to come to fruition. The giant mall in my area just 100% closed and is being completely torn down to the dirt which it was long ago built upon. I like the alternative of a smaller, more catered to, and mostly a more pleasant experience that comes with smaller atmospheres. Your truly serviced, and if done correctly, you can actually sense and even feel the difference, as time or numbers are not causing them to rush, and as such they have time to listen to you as well.
As far a automobiles go, they sold every damn vehicle they could force an approving loan to make, much like colleges, but I digress… anyone that needs one has one, and more importantly, anyone that can afford one already has one. I dare ask, will we witness the rust spots once again? The days of everyone driving a new car every 3-4 years are long over imo. Even lower cost rentals are not available as they once were. Unions will have to take a hit (finally), which may help drive the cost down, so they can be competitive once again. Keeping the manufacturing here, if still possible, after the reduction in pay takes place. Heck, CarMax is here to stay and getting more streamlined by the day.
My questions are simple.
1. Will we see Car Trucks popping up in large rented open spaces, dropping down and selling their cars?
2. Will we see locations popping up, where they are designed for this sort of activity? A new Car Show / Sale if you will?
3. Can this sort of activity be utilized for areas of good, by say Animal Rescue Shelters? A vehicle designed for transporting pets to comfortable places (designed for such activity) for giving pets to pet lovers looking for them.
The list could go on, but the point is a better way of accomplishing things by bringing it to the seekers, instead of the other way around. We will (do) have lots of empty spaces with malls and the like closing. We have many underutilized spaces that can be brought up to become such a space.
– Where Food Spending Goes? I say forget that question, as we have a much larger question than that, and it needs to be answered. “How Much is spent on Alcohol in Restaurants” forget food, because without a breakdown of what kind specifically, it hold little value. Alcohol is Alcohol, so the number is actually real.
1. How much spent on Alcohol in a Restaurant?
2. What % of the Restaurant bill is Alcohol?
3. What’s the breakdown between Beer, Wine, and Hard Alcohol?Etc.
The point being, if we want to extrapolate useful information, then we could do a much better job, doing so on needed numbers we can do something with. Perhaps give us a red light where needed? Have us ask more important questions, as a result of some of the answers. The list goes on with this particular one, no?
– Spending on food eating out (not counting tips) surpassed spending on eating at home in April of 2022. > Alcohol Inc.?
The BLS weighs food at home at 8.235 percent of the CPI with food away from home at 5.277 percent. > Apples to Apples?
Big Brother’s “kill switch” will significantly diminish sales of new cars when it goes into effect.
Greenspew gets cashiered….looked upon as some sort of financial genius….for handing out free money. Good riddance.
The Man Who Knew https://a.co/d/0i1q7aMQ
Just a few years ago I was arguing homes without kitchens were the future. I have so many friends who spent huge money on kitchen remodels who were eating out 90% of the time. $100 to $200 grand for nothing.
Tell me more about their girth.
It’s not for cooking… it’s for bragging, like most of what we spend our money on.
You can buy a lot of take out food for $100-200k.
Without a kitchen, you can buy a house with less square feet – saving another $100-200k.
I know an Indian couple in Texas that had an expensive home built with two kitchens, one for display and the other one to cook in.
It’s part of the demographic death spiral. If you don’t make new humans, there won’t be a need for them to purchase a vehicle. Universities are going broke because there aren’t enough high school students to fill slots. If there aren’t enough kids to fill college slots then they won’t be buying cars either, assuming you could afford either.
The Wall Street Journal had an article out yesterday about how home ownership expenses are out of control. The same things I have been warning about for years here (insurance, utilities, maintenance, HOA, property taxes, etc).
https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/home-ownership-costs-charts-7fe04eb3
Those expenses will only go UP with the demographic death spiral. Too many old people not working (a loss of carpenters, electricians, plumbers, roofers, etc) and too many houses to maintain and not enough workers. Add hostility to immigrants and you double the problem and accelerate it.
Things will only grow worse, that’s a guarantee.
Got exit strategy?
Ergo, the need to import more people, especially those willing to breed. Must keep an impoverished mass to make stuff for low wages until robots come out and keep the fat cats… porky. It’s been so for eons: slavery, serfdom, wage labor, and so on.
People keep imagining robots like “Data” from Star Trek, a fully autonomous thinking, talking, working robot and Elon Musk has been promising fully autonomous cars for 20 years now.
Waymo has been in the news a lot for cars blocking emergency vehicles, driving into each other, and other stupid stuff and somehow we’re going to have DATA like robots replacing everyone.
I imagine these robots will end up picking up a baby and throwing it in the trash because it can’t distinguish one from the other.
Robots will eventually come but they will be so expensive to own and operate that only the rich will afford them, at least for the first decade or two.
Prob more like the Jetsons’ maid 🙂
Those robots don’t matter. The robots that are going to decimate the need to have employees do. They started with tractors, then factory robots, now office AI. Farm laborers went to the factories; factory workers went to the offices; where will office workers go to? It remains to be seen, but pitchforks and the guillotine are always possibilities.
– Those robots don’t matter. > All robot lives matter… sorry I just had to…
– The robots that are going to decimate the need to have employees do. > A lot of these jobs they will take, will be low skill, repetitive in nature, and well worth the cost savings. These are not jobs preparing one for the future. These are paper route type jobs, that need to be done, are not hard, but you need to find people to do it, because most don’t want to work mundane tasks for a living. Perfect jobs for robots to learn and emulate. It will be awhile before they take over this industry, which is why I have no worries. If it’s taking this much time with fast food, we are miles away from office workers dealing with staff, and massive buildings with lots of real estate to maneuver through, and task no longer mundane…
– now office AI. where will office workers go to? > That’s the real question that needs answers. When the technology finally does arrive, are we grooming robots to take the low wage, mundane task, that they would be good for, or are they truly looking for low cost labor eventually, and the higher the salary replaced, the more money they make? If for nefarious reasons, then they could end up decimating our current manufacturing way of life, and that could get ugly fast, with no skilled labor left to take back over for the unusable robots…
Sounds right! They have been working on fast food robots for quite sometime, but not off the ground yet, as it’s still in the testing phase… Having a hard time distinguishing things as you stated, and also dealing with humans is not as easy as thought. They will com, but it may be awhile still before it becomes mainstream imo.
It’s not because of the death spiral (which will never happen since a 50% loss of population would just be where things were when I was a kid and no one was worried about having too few people then). It’s simply a logical conclusion of 2 things.
1) People ordering online more than ever (some like you I know never set foot in a store and most people are probably close to 50/50 or more on online ordering).
2) Cars lasting longer so fewer new sales needed.
Demographics is a significant part here. While ‘death spiral’ may be sensationalized, the boomer generation has distorted all trends as it passed through life. Surely assisted-living facilities will be overbuilt just as elementary schools were 60 years ago.
Consider how many vehicles someone purchases after 70 – on average it’s probably less than 1. As a growing percentage of the population is 70+, it’s obvious that there will be a shift in purchasing patterns.
When you were a kid, how many highways were there? How many skyscappers were there when you were a kid? How many houses existed across America when you were a kid? How many water treatment plants? How many electrical substations? How many school buildings?
Bonus question: Who is going to maintain ALL that over the next decades?
When you were a kid there were plenty of young boomers to build and maintain all that and that won’t be the case moving forward. It’s a shame that you can’t think and see it.
Google says:
Age 65+ = 61.2 million (2025-26 census estimates)
Age <18 = 73.1 million (2025-26 census estimates)
Age 18-64 is 206 million, so roughly 82% <65
Death Rate age 65+ 4074/100,000 (2019 CDC data)
So we’re losing ~2.5 million/year who are 65+.
I’m not arguing necessarily, but I’m not planning to move to Hanoi anytime soon, although I’d like to visit again.
I just bought a 5-pack of decent athletic shorts on Amazon for $25. That might not cover 2 beers and a tip out on the town. /s
Not sure where your math is coming from but according to the social security snapshot, there are 75m people on social security. 75m/240m = 31% but what most don’t get is every day everyone ages and the numbers accelerate across all age groups from millennials to genx over the next decade.
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/
75/340=22%, but point taken. It’s interesting that the average monthly SS benefit (May 2026 data) is $1934.52. That’s $1.65T annually…yikes!
My quick search is from (again, just trying to establish baseline perspective):
US Population by Age 2026 | Demographics Stats & Facts – The World Data
National Vital Statistics Reports Volume 72, Number 14 December 15, 2023
I don’t drink alcohol, but many friend’s of mine do. I quit awhile ago, and I do hear a lot of my friends complaining about prices. I recall it being about the same amount as the food for my wife and I to have dinner out and two drinks (martinis) and the tip. It’s obviously not like that any longer from what I hear. I do know we eat out less now, and we often get water, as soda is now around $3.50 for a glass.
– The Wall Street Journal had an article out yesterday about how home ownership expenses are out of control. The same things I have been warning about for years here (insurance, utilities, maintenance, HOA, property taxes, etc).
> They most certainly are, but it’s everywhere and on everything now isn’t it? Insurance has increased steadily for years now, it’s completely out of control. Same with Electricity and Water. Maintenance is a wild card, because it directly tied into how often, how much, and how good was the job. I was the person in my last subdivision house I owned, voted to be in charge of the HOA. Never again would I buy a home that has one, or be in charge of it for the development (mine had around 40 homes). You have no actual authority, and people that don’t want to pay, just didn’t. Now try asking for a bump in HOA due to non participation by all. Yeah, I had enough of that and fast, when I finally left there, the homeowners begged me to stay on as the HOA leader, and I was moving hours away from there! Nobody would take it over, and I gave a 6 Month warning I was looking to leave and they needed to replace me asap, crickets…
>> Property tax reassessment happens on different schedules depending on your state (generally every 1-5 years. Find your state’s cycle and what triggers an off-cycle reassessment.
Reason claimed: Reducing property assessment frequency causes unexpected increases in taxes following the reassessment. There is some logic to that, but I would prefer to hold onto that money for the full 5 years, and not get hit so frequently if possible. I understand your counting on the home owner to have due diligence, but isn’t that their job, as a home owner?
Eating at a restaurant has become a luxury item in America. The number of restaurant visits is declining, even as the amount spent seems to be increasing.
Anecdotally I disagree. I see a lot of people in my circle, mostly the younger ones, not batting an eye eating out. I would guess as the baby boomers have reached retirement age, though they can afford to eat out, you generally slow down a whole lot more in retirement than you thought you would…oh, and you eat a LOT less.
The young in my cohort view eating out as simply eating. That doesn’t change the fact that fast(er) food is PRICED like a luxury.
Mish’s comments on the weighting of inflation demonstrate its growth in the American budget as well as its import in the economy…the eating-away-from-home component of food.
Excellent reply. TRUE, all of it.
They don’t bat an eye and regard eating as simply eating? Can they cook? Can they tie their shoelaces or only use slip in shoes? Meet Millennials and their follow ups.
It makes total sense to eat out a lot when you are single. The cost and time to prepare food for 1 at home doesn’t add up when you factor in all the ingredients you need and how hard it is to get 1 chicken breast or burger patty etc.
What you are seeing is really the affect of younger people delaying marriage. A generation or two ago people in their early 20s would be married and eating at home often with babies in their late 20s. Now family formation is not happening till 30s so you are eating alone.
Cooking at home is easy and an order of magnitude cheaper than ordering no matter for how many.
Is it possible the younger demo is “eating out” their ability to purchase a home?
They have given up on that, and I don’t blame them. Homeownership has become just another scam run by wealthy investors.
– Anecdotally I disagree. I see a lot of people in my circle, mostly the younger ones, not batting an eye eating out. > I agree with that. My kids and most of my friend’s kids all go out to eat all the time. It’s the demographic when I rarely do go out. My kids tell me they order small and lower cost items, and drink water. They like the experience and vibe of eating out, so they work it so they can do so. It’s like their meeting spot instead of people homes as I used to do when younger. I get it.
– I would guess as the baby boomers have reached retirement age, though they can afford to eat out, you generally slow down a whole lot more in retirement than you thought you would…oh, and you eat a LOT less. > I fall into this category, and I eat out rarely, but it’s often when my wife and I don’t feel like cooking. We generally will hit a place very reasonably priced but with good food for the cost. We have found a handful that meet this criteria, so we simply go to them on a rotating basis when the need arises. It’s also a pain to go far to eat out, as it sort of ruins the experience for us in a small way.
I spent $207 for 4 at a restaurant in Boston last night. That would be 2 weeks of meals eating at home (my wife and I) in Florida. My wife has a friend who eats out every meal, and is essentially bankrupt. She has $30k in credit card debt and 2 jobs and can’t figure out why she can’t get ahead.
Thanks for the realistic assessment of food’s impact on CPI Mish.
Sounds about as expensive as Culinary Academy. How ironic! Let’s see her eat her way out of this one.
What’s the collateral to the bank on her credit card debt?
Only her credit score.
That you and your wife can eat at home for 100 a week (207 = 2 weeks) in Florida is nothing short of amazing unless you are both older and eating really tiny portions.
I also live in Florida (with 2 teens in addition to the misses) and 100 a week for groceries just isn’t possible for us. It’s WAY more than that but we also like beef and fish (ie we aren’t just eating chicken/pork and pasta).
When dining out it’s always the alcohol that pushes the meal price to insane levels especially when you are dining locally and know which places have deals (ie Monday night a local place has $5 1/2 burgers and fries so I can take the family for $20 in food excluding drinks).
Incidentally when I tip at restaurants I NEVER tip on the tax. I only tip on the actual food/beverages. Many just tip on final bill price which means they are tipping on tax which is silly.
Wife’s a vegan, and I hate to cook. So not a lot of expensive meats in the house. Plus we shop at Aldi.
Awful Aldi. Have they upped their brand?
I used to shop there when mostly the poor did. Some of their dry goods barely qualified as “food”.
Understate CPI by understating HOA fees, RE taxes, and insurance? Check!
Understate CPI by excluding Tips from Food AWay from home when they are required by any place with servers? Check!
Skew the CPI to show more spending on Food at Home than at Restaurants ? Check!
Build a society dependent on warehouse fulfillment, “free” shipping, and auto-ship, all at the expense of local retail real estate tax base and local jobs for young people? Check!
Maybe they can all get jobs at the data center going in on the outskirts of town?
Just because we “can” do something doesn’t mean we “should” do it.