Annual Retail Trade Survey

The Annual Retail Trade Survey (ARTS) is the Census Bureau's annual benchmark for US retail: sales, inventories and purchases, gross margin, per capita sales, e-commerce sales and sales taxes, by kind of business. The cataloged motor-vehicle-dealers record spells out the temporal coverage - ARTS sales, inventories and purchases 1992-2022; gross margin 1993-2022; per capita sales 2000-2022; e-commerce 1998-2022; sales taxes 2004-2022 - with detailed operating expenses only in years ending in 2 and 7.

Two structural notes matter. From reference year 2023 forward, the Annual Integrated Economic Survey (AIES) succeeds ARTS. And the files are small: each ARTS measure workbook is 60-200 KB of Excel, while the AIES 2023 retail summary zip is 9.5 KB compressed (34 KB .dat) - these are compact benchmark tables, not volumetric feeds. Kind-of-business detail reaches 6-digit lines such as 44111 new car dealers and 44112 used car dealers.

Monthly retail series move fast but rest on samples; ARTS is the annual anchor that re-benchmarks them. Without it, ratio work - inventories-to-sales, gross margin per dealer class - has no authoritative denominator, and monthly revisions accumulate unnoticed.

The buyer consequence is the survey transition. ARTS series stop at 2022; anything claiming current-year ARTS figures is repackaging something else. Detailed operating expenses appear only in years ending in 2 and 7, so multi-year expense modelling has holes unless planned around. And the successor's smallest deliverables are startlingly compact - a 9.5 KB zip - which is a feature for analysts and a red flag for anyone expecting a big-data feed.

1. Check the series end-date. ARTS coverage runs 1992-2022 (sales/inventories/purchases), with gross margin from 1993 and e-commerce from 1998 - confirm which measures your vendor extends and how.

1. Ask who supplies post-2022. From reference year 2023 forward the AIES succeeds ARTS; a credible feed says so explicitly rather than extrapolating.

1. Note the operating-expense gap. Detail exists only in years ending in 2 and 7 - design expense studies around those vintages.

1. Validate the NAICS depth. Motor vehicle dealers reach 6-digit lines like 44111 new car dealers, 44112 used car dealers and 4413 parts stores; shallower cuts forfeit the survey's value.

1. Expect spreadsheets, not databases. Measure workbooks run 60-200 KB of Excel with CSV-via-data.census.gov and JSON API alternatives - plan light-weight ingestion.

These glossary entries sit next to Annual Retail Trade Survey:

• annual-integrated-economic-survey
• e-commerce-retail-series
• monthly-retail-trade-survey