E Commercibus Caveat Blowhardus

Preparatory to next week's release of the Department of Commerce's second-quarter statistics on e-commerce, dig the results for the first quarter. The numbers [pdf] are not shocking: Retail sales from teh interwebs fell in Q4 2008 and Q1 2009. But what caught my eye was the column "E-commerce as a Percent of Total" (should that be percentage?) in Table 3.

The statistics go all the way back to Old '99, when Kozmo and Petopia still pointed the way toward a transfigured future in which all the lineaments of gratified desire would be available to every man woman and child on the planet at the speed of thought on steroids (or I guess back then we used to say "on crack"). They show the share of online retail growing strongly (from 0.6 percent of the total in Q4 1999 to 3.5 percent in Q1 2009) and more or less consistently.

But the e-commerce share still tops out at a small fraction of the total. In previous writings I cited the growth of e-commerce as a reason the commercial real estate (CRE) market faces both short-term and long-term illness. I still would advise nobody except my worst enemy to invest ceteris paribus in commercial real estate, for at least a few years. But I want to dial back my claim that the dawning of the age digitarius will seriously cut into a CRE recovery.