The impact of a gasoline crisis on retail sales

The gasoline crises of the 1970s demonstrated the need for including gasoline prices and gasoline shortages in models explaining retail sales. In this article, a model is constructed that incorporates the aforementioned variables, other variables, and a lagged sales figure as independent variable. The results indicate a high degree of explanatory power in predicting retail sales for a specialty store chain with a preponderance of their stores in large regional malls that sell a product which lends itself to unplanned purchase behaviour.