CAME manipulates sales data for Children's Day by excluding online sales

The Argentine Confederation of Medium Enterprises (CAME) has once again come under scrutiny for the way it presents its consumption statistics, after reporting that sales for Children's Day fell by 2.5% year-on-year, in a measurement that does not fully reflect the growing weight of operations carried out through digital channels.

According to the report published this Sunday, the average spending per transaction reached $45,892, compared to $33,736 last year. In fact, the organization itself acknowledged that the ticket recorded a real increase of 0.8%, once inflation was discounted. Additionally, 81.2% of the surveyed businesses applied some type of promotion.

However, the main problem arises when presenting the result as a general snapshot of sales for Children's Day. The survey is focused on small retail businesses and does not fully capture the operations that are now channeled through marketplaces, digital stores, and other e-commerce platforms.

The omission is particularly striking because CAME itself acknowledges in its report that merchants faced greater competition from "alternative marketing channels". In the specific case of toy stores, it even explicitly points out the competition from electronic platforms, in addition to bazaars, imported products, and informal fairs: as if those parts were not part of commerce.

The questioning that Galperin had made days earlier

Just a week before, the founder of Mercado Libre, Marcos Galperin, had publicly questioned another CAME report on retail sales in July and its methodological issues.

“Someone should compare the volume of everything that CAME measures vs the volume that Mercado Libre Argentina transacts,” suggested the successful entrepreneur, who stated that the volume operated by the company had been growing 38% in constant currency during the last quarter.

Galperin pointed to a clear problem: using the evolution of traditional commerce to draw conclusions about aggregate consumption, while an increasingly larger portion of operations migrates to digital channels.

The new report for Children's Day again exposes that limitation and apparent deliberation by the organization. Its data may be valid for describing the behavior of the surveyed universe, but traditional sectors have ceased to be the main sales channels for years.