Retail Cost Trackers Methodology
Retailer financial-report basket, Eurostat service-price proxies, furniture retail wages, partial country coverage, and interpretation limits for retail cost-pressure trackers.
Indicator scope
The tracker basket originates from Furnilytics analysis of international furniture retailer financial reports. The report analysis is used to group recurring retail cost elements into a compact proxy basket that can be updated from public statistical price series.
Two datasets are published: a retail operating cost index for occupancy and store operations, and a retail services and marketing cost index for customer-service, headquarters, IT and marketing pressure. The indexes are monthly and rebased to 2021=100.
sts_sepp_q service producer-price indexes and Furnilytics furniture retail wagesSource mapping
The retail operating cost index combines Eurostat service producer-price indexes for real estate, building and facility services, administrative support services and telecommunications. The retail services and marketing index combines Furnilytics furniture retail wages with Eurostat advertising and market-research service producer prices.
The Eurostat source is sts_sepp_q, service producer prices, using non-seasonally adjusted
2021-base price indexes where available. The main NACE Rev. 2 categories used are L68
real estate activities, N81 services to buildings, N82 administrative support,
J61 telecommunications, and M73 advertising and market research.
Switzerland is included where source rows are available. Where a component is not available for a country, Furnilytics does not silently substitute another country or source. The simple public table keeps only the published index value; component coverage remains documented in the methodology and dataset metadata.
Calculation
Eurostat quarterly service producer-price indexes are carried across the three months of each quarter. Furniture retail wage values are rebased to a 2021 average of 100 before entering the services and marketing tracker. Components are then combined with the fixed basket weights from the retailer report analysis.
Partial country rows are published only when the available components represent a sufficient part of the
intended basket. The public tables are intentionally simple and contain only date,
geo, and value; component-coverage diagnostics are retained in methodology
metadata rather than exposed as analytical columns.
Interpretation limits
These trackers are cost-pressure proxies. They should be used to compare movement over time and to add context to retail margin-pressure analysis. They should not be interpreted as complete operating expense, rent, logistics, markdown, EBIT, or company-margin measures.