Loose lips sink economies

I wish I had had a way of capturing the screen image that confronted me on Sky News this morning. While the reporter was yammering on about the dire state of the economy, there were three lines of text at the bottom of the screen. The first line simply said "RECESSION". On two lines below that was the sentence, "TESCO to add 10,000 jobs this year after rise in like-for-like Christmas sales". Wow, that's the kind of recession we want.

Still, at least Sky accepted that Tesco's sales were higher. Over at the Guardian, the same story began with the sentence "Britain's descent into full-blown recession was highlighted today as Tesco reported its weakest Christmas sales since the last slump". Or, to put it another way (and this time in line with the facts), Tesco's sales in December were its highest on record. True, the growth in same-store sales, at only 2.5%, was the slowest since the early 1990s. But Tesco pointed out that the impact of the VAT cut meant that underlying same-store sales were 3.5% higher; moreover, since these are same-store numbers, and given that Tesco is still opening stores all over the place, its total sales growth was higher even than that.

The good old British Retail Consortium also weighed in today, saying that Christmas sales on the High Street were the worst in 14 years. Well, apparently they weren't for Tesco, which is by far the country's largest retailer. They weren't for Sainsbury's, Wm Morrison and Asda, either, all of whom are planning to join Tesco in adding jobs this year. Nor, staying in the grocery sector, for Waitrose, which had its best ever day of sales on December 23. Nor for Waitrose's parent company, John Lewis, nor for Amazon. (On January 9 the warehouse despatcher at our local John Lewis told me they had eight trucks and two vans out delivering for 15 hours that day). And certainly not for the local retailer whom I visited on January 5 to buy a television. The salesman told me that they had been painfully busy every day since Boxing Day, with queues outside the door on many occasions.

Interestingly, the media's "PANIC NOW!" message doesn't yet seem to be fazing the public. A Populus opinion poll in today's Times shows that while people are gloomy about the overall economic outlook, they're much less worried about their own situation. I can't think of any explanation for that gap, other than to suggest that opinions about the macro situation are largely formed by media comments, while personal expectations reflect what people see going on around them.

I'm not trying to deny that there are problems in the economy. But it would be more than helpful if the BRC and other such interest groups could keep a sense of perspective, and if the news media could find a few people who can actually read and report economic statistics accurately.