U.S. Retail Sales Suffer Biggest Plunge on Record: Live Updates

[progree]

6. They explain:

Even those bleak figures don’t fully capture the economic deep freeze. Most states didn’t issue shutdown orders to nonessential businesses until late March or early April, meaning data for the current month could be worse still.

But even then, I'm surprised.

Note that the jobs figures were unexpectedly not super-bad for March (down 701,000) that came out Friday April 3 -- but the explanation is that they have a sample week that includes the 12th of the month -- so that sample week was before most of the big shutdowns. I'm wondering if they don't have something similar for retail sales -- some sample week rather than actually adding everything up for the whole month.