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In The Blink Of An Eye

With all the focus on CE comp sales and profitability, it’s sometime easy to forget the startling sell-through this and other industries generate at retail.

For a visually striking reminder, check out the “Retail in Real-Time” animated infographic from Retale. The company, which aggregates sales circulars for its location-based mobile app, has compiled some startling retail statistics which it graphically illustrates in a series of millisecond-by-millisecond readouts.

Among the displays: the number of customers accessing Best Buy’s stores and websites; the number of viruses removed by Geek Squad; and the net weight of all the devices recycled by the CE chain — all from the time you opened the page. (Since I started writing this column about seven minutes ago, Best Buy has, on average, served 14,349 customers, removed 1,776 viruses and recycled 5,254 pounds of CE hardware.)

Other running totals include U.S. e-book sales; the number of smartphones sold, lost and stolen; net sales at Amazon.com and Walmart; and total U.S. retail sales both on- and offline.

While the site isn’t tracking actual real-time transactions, Retale depicts the great maw that is U.S. consumer demand, and how much is served up in the blink of an eye to satisfy it.

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