EP239 - Retail Sales Data with US Census Bureau  Paul Bucchioni is Branch Chief and Scott Scheleur is a Supervisory Survey Statistician, both with the Retail Indicator Branch, Economic Indicators Division of the U.S. Census Bureau. In this interview, Paul and Scott walk us through the real sales data products that the US Census publishes and gives us advance about how to interpret the data. US Census Retail Data Site Twitter Account: @uscensusbureau St. Louis Federal Reserve Tool (FRED) Google Public Dataset Tool Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 239 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Wednesday, October 7th, 2020. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 239 being recorded on Wednesday October 7th 2020 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-hosts Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners, Jason if there’s one thing we agree on it’s our love of data and one of our favorite data sets is the e-commerce data published by the US Census Bureau. Both of us get a lot of questions about this data we talked about it a lot I think it was episode 233 we spent a fair amount of time kind of just talking about the data and what was going on there that we saw and, so we get all these questions and we thought what better way to understand this data then to hear the details right from the horse’s mouth. So on tonight’s show we were really excited to have and we just learned that they listen to the podcast that’s even more exciting Paul book kyani and Scott Sheeler on the show from the US Census Bureau welcome to the show guys. Jason: [1:28] We are doing terrific and Paul I know you guys listen to the show so you know exactly how we always start we like to let the guests introduced themselves a little bit to the audience so maybe we could start with you can you tell us a little bit about yourself how you came to the field and in your current role at the US Census Bureau. Paul: [1:47] Sure so I started my career at the Census Bureau about 16 years ago and the entire time that I’ve been there I have been working in the monthly retailgeek, I’ll Branch so I’ve always always been working with retail and one way or another my background is in finance and economics, I dealt a little bit with Finance in the in the stockbroker type field before I came to the bureau but since I’ve been at the bureau I’ve been in the monthly retail started as an analyst I’ve worked on all industries that has to do with monthly Retail Sales inventory, e-commerce and I’ve been I’ve been in here ever since and working as a manager now I’m the branch chief of the of the retail branch and yeah that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing the last 16 years. Jason: [2:31] That is awesome I’m always terrified to talk data and economics with people that actually know the fields like we have these phrases at work there are people that are data fluent and there are people that our data literate and I’m like barely data literate. Thrilled thrilled to have some data fluent people on the show and Scott can you introduce yourself. Scott S: [2:56] Sure thanks Jason Scott Schiller I’ve been at the bureau will just say longer than Paul and. You know I’ve been involved in basically retail wholesale and services my whole career currently both Paul and I are in the economic indicators division. Where we are kind of responsible for measuring a lot of the economy from the trade balances to the manufacturer shipments inventories orders data to the quarterly Services data to monthly wholesale and of course to retailgeek. So we