If you were to ask me what the point of Timetric is… to be honest, you’d get a few different answers. It’d depend on what kind of day I was having. One of the main ones, though, is this: every single time series, if you dig deep enough, is really a story about people’s lives. Some are more profound than others, some are more universal, but they’re all stories about numbers which affect us.
One of the deepest collections of datasets we have on Timetric is the UK’s National Statistics Time Series data, which you can find on Timetric here.
Two subsets of that are employment and detailed retail sales data.
The headline story with employment, obviously, is how many people are claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance. Since the economy turned at the start of last year:
There’s not much else to be said about that; eight hundred thousand people are doubling the length of JobCentre queues compared to the start of last year.
The stories in the retail data are a bit more subtle. Many of the statistics measured are fairly technical, although undoubtedly valuable to specialists! There are still some interesting tales to be found beyond the typical headline-RPI/CPI data you’d hear about on the news, though. Here’s one — “Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales”:
Unsurprisingly, people like staying home in the winter – as a proportion of all sales, Internet sales peak in December, and then drop again in the summer; that’s when people are out of the office on holiday or out in the fresh air getting their radiation dose from the Sun rather than an LCD screen!
So, every summer the shops gain back some of what they lose in the runup to Christmas. Still, they don’t regain it all: some people decide they’re quite happy getting their new toys delivered, thanks very much. The knock-on effects can be pretty profound, too: ask an independent bookshop going up against Amazon.
And that’s one of the reasons we care about getting this data into your hands; every point, and every line, is a powerful little tool for helping things make sense.
