June was marked by uneven retail sales in U.S.

June is usually a month for clearing out merchandise, but many retailers this year seemed to go especially heavy on the discounts.

Abercrombie & Fitch Co. sold some shorts at half-price at its Hollister chain. During the fourth week of the month, Gap Inc.'s Old Navy chain offered 30% off the entire store for six days.

A string of weak months for retailers that began in April has damped the glow that had lingered from a strong holiday season, when consumers loosened their purse strings and spent more freely. Now, retailers have fresh worries about the key back-to-school period that kicks off later this month.

"You can see week-to-week differences today that are far more volatile than what we have been seeing," R. James Kelly, president and chief operating officer of Family Dollar Stores Inc., said Wednesday on a call with investors to discuss the deep discounter's fiscal third-quarter earnings. Sales at its stores open at least a year rose 5.5% in June, but the company's fourth-quarter outlook was lower than Wall Street expected.

MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, a unit of MasterCard Inc., that tracks spending by credit card, debit card, cash and check, said that specialty apparel sales rose 3.3% in June. Electronics rose 2.0%, in part because of the launch of Apple's iPhone 4. Department-store sales posted a 1.3% increase, the first rise since November 2006. Still, those categories remain far off their pre-recession levels.

Some types of retailers had a tougher month. Luxury sales fell 3.9% in June from a year earlier, the first decline for the category since November. Furniture sales fell 5%.

A more detailed portrait of retail sales strength will come Thursday, when 28 retail chains report June sales. An index of analyst estimates from Thomson Reuters predicts a 3.2% increase in sales at stores open at least a year, following a 4.9% decline in the year-ago period.

Recovery periods "tend to happen in waves," said Michael McNamara, vice president of research and analysis for SpendingPulse. "We had a bit of a crest in the first quarter, where growth was coming in at a decent clip."

"We're still growing, but it's at a very mild rate," he said.

Shoppers are wary in an uncertain macroeconomic environment. Non-farm payrolls shed 125,000 jobs last month, even as the unemployment rate fell. Consumer confidence dropped in June, erasing the gains of the prior two months, according to the Conference Board, a non-profit research group.

Retailers had a lot of things going for them last month. The five-week period of June benefited from part of two long holiday weekends Memorial Day and the Fourth of July as well as much warmer temperatures across the U.S., which are conducive to seasonal purchases.

But some retailers entered the month with too much inventory and had to ramp up promotions to spark demand. Teen retailer American Eagle Outfitters Inc. said it entered May with inventory levels up 15%.

Last weekend, roughly three quarters of the store was, on average, marked half off, according to Roxanne Meyer, a retail analyst with UBS Investment Research. The company declined to comment on her estimate.

Many retailers had some of the easiest comparisons of the year in June, meaning the bar they had to clear to show improvement was particularly low. Abercrombie & Fitch reported sales down 32% in June 2009 over June 2008.

Limited Brands Inc., which operates Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works, is expected to post a 3.2% increase for June sales. The company's conservative inventory management has helped it shorten many of its major promotions.

Even so, the company is cautious. "We are still sailing through a lot of uncertainty," Martyn Redgrave, Limited's chief administrative officer, said at a conference June 22. "We catch the wind, then we lose the wind."