The Manufacturing and Trade
Inventories and Sales Report for August is scheduled to be released October 12,
2006 at 10:00 a.m. EDT.
For information, visit the Census
Bureau's Web site at <http://www.census.gov/bussales>.
This report is also available the day of issue through the Department of
Commerce's STAT-USA (202-482-1986).
* The 90 percent confidence interval includes
zero. The Census Bureau does not have sufficient statistical evidence to
conclude that the actual change is different from zero.
See footnotes and notes at the end of Table 3.
(p) Preliminary.
(r) Revised.
(s) Adjusted data were revised due
to concurrent seasonal adjustment. No revisions were made to Not Adjusted data.
(p) Preliminary.
(r) Revised.
(s)
Adjusted data were revised due to concurrent seasonal adjustment. No revisions
were made to Not Adjusted data.
1 Inventories are on a non-LIFO basis
as of the end of the month.
2 Adjusted for seasonal variations
and, in the case of sales, for trading-day differences and holiday variations.
Concurrent seasonal adjustment is being used to adjust all sales, shipment, and
inventory estimates. Concurrent seasonal adjustment uses all available
unadjusted estimates as input to the X-12-ARIMA program. The factors derived
from the program are applied to the current and previous month estimates and for
retail and wholesale estimates a year ago as well. For retail sales, concurrent
seasonal adjustment is also used to adjust the advance estimates (published one
month before the preliminary estimates) and the estimates one year before the
advance month. This explains the revision to retail estimates from a year
ago.
3 Manufacturers sales refer to the value of shipments by
manufacturers. The shipments data from individual manufacturers are adjusted
prior to tabulation for the number of trading days as well as for any variations
in the length of the reporting period.
Note: U.S. and group totals include kinds of
business not shown. The Manufacturing and Trade Inventory and Sales estimates
are based on data from three surveys: the Monthly Retail Trade Survey, the
Monthly Wholesale Trade Survey, and the Manufacturers' Shipments, Inventories,
and Orders Survey. The sampling variability for retailers and merchant
wholesalers can be used to construct a 90 percent confidence interval for the
estimates. Over all possible samples, 90 percent of such intervals will cover
the true estimate. These intervals are given in parentheses for the estimates on
the front page. If, for example, the estimate is up 0.8 percent and the margin
of sampling error is ±1.2 percent, the 90 percent confidence interval is -0.4
percent to +2.0 percent. If the range contains 0, it is uncertain whether there
was an increase or decrease. Measures of reliability for Retail and Wholesale
sales and inventory levels and changes are included in the detailed monthly
press releases for those Industries. Manufacturers do not contribute to
estimates of sampling variability because the manufacturer's mail panel is not a
probability sample from a known frame and standard errors of the industry
estimates cannot be calculated. Estimates from all three surveys are also
subject to nonsampling errors, which can arise in any stage of the survey. Such
errors include coverage error (failure to accurately represent all population
units in the sample), response errors, coding errors, and nonresponse. Although
no direct measurement of these errors has been obtained, precautionary steps
were taken in all phases of the collection, processing, and tabulation of the
data to minimize their influence.
