well, the decline appears to be from 2012, so it’s not from pre-recession spending, but you’re right that it’s the elephant in the room (the china shop in the bear market?)
it makes me think how in this supposed age of ‘big data’ there’s comparatively little effort to compare figures across different sources – for example, how does this decline match broader measures of consumer spending, or declines in previous years. part of it is journalism works on speed and there’s still a fair amount of work in interpreting figures even if you have access to them, and part of it is probably people’s healthy distrust of statistics (lies, damn lies…). I feel with the potential of the internet there ought to be more cohesive efforts brought to bear on the media’s generally partial use of them.