The Official May 2009 NPD Thread (Data at 6:30 PM EST)

[gebx]

dolemit3 said:

NJ5 said:
How to find out how many weeks those numbers refer to?

I thought it was only the last month of each quarter which had 5 weeks.

The coverage is between May 3rd and May 30th.

 

Yeah, its 4 weeks.. its explained here

 

http://www.thesimexchange.com/blogpost.php?post_id=341

Martin at NPD explained to me that this actually is not an NPD invention but the retail industry’s standard calendar. “Retailers track and report their data on a weekly basis, with each week running from Sunday through Saturday. When they calculate monthly sales, they add up the weeks - since they historically didn't have daily sales data available, they didn't actually calculate the exact month's sales (e.g. June 1st to June 30th), they just add up the nearest 4 or 5 weeks, depending on the month.”

“The official retail industry calendar has March, June, September and December as 5-week months, with the rest being 4-week months. And since a year is slightly more than 52 weeks, every few years there's a "leap year" declared and one of the months gets an extra week to keep the retail calendar's months roughly in sync with the regular calendar. This past February was a 5-week month for that reason, which made year-on-year growth comparisons for that month a bit biased.”

 

I'm glad to know that retail industry created there own calendar...