The COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on retail stores in the United States.
With retail giants closing stores to stop the spread of the coronavirus, sales are dropping.
According to the Commerce Department , retail sales plunged 8.7 percent last month.
The decline was by far the largest in the nearly three decades the government has tracked the data, the New York Times reported.
Sales were down 8.2 percent in February.
Total sales for January 2020 through March 2020 period were up 1.1 percent from the same period a year ago, the Commerce Department reported in a statement Wednesday.