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Consumer spending fell for the third-consecutive month in December, confirming what many economists had predicted would be a disappointing holiday season for many retailers.

Retail sales fell 0.7 percent last month, the Commerce Department said on Friday, as the economic recovery showed signs of stalling, stimulus money ran dry and virus cases surged across the country, prompting shoppers to avoid stores.

The decline also likely reflects how retailers’ strategies of offering holiday deals early this fall spread out the holiday shopping season across months, and may have dampened sales closer to Christmas.

The drop was widespread across many categories, including electronics, building supplies and food and beverage stores, which had been areas of strong spending last spring and summer. Spending at restaurants in December was also down amid a rise in new cases and new closures.

The Commerce Department also revised its November sales data, showing a decline of 1.4 percent, larger than the 1.1 percent drop it had previously reported.

The three months of weak consumer spending, which comprises 70 percent of the U.S. economy, adds new urgency to the $1.9 trillion economic rescue package that the incoming Biden administration proposed this week, which increase direct payments to individuals by $1,400.

Britain’s economy declined in November, the earliest signal that the country might be heading for its second round of contraction within months — a double-dip recession — because of the severity of the second wave of the pandemic and the restrictions that have been imposed on businesses and the population.

Gross domestic product dropped 2.6 percent in November, when a second lockdown was imposed across England, after six consecutive months of economic growth, according to the Office for National Statistics.

That said, the impact of this second lockdown was much less economically severe than the closures last spring, when the economy fell by more than 18 percent. The difference this time was, in part, because the restrictions were looser and more businesses had adapted: schools remained open, more people could go to their workplaces and many retail and hospitality businesses had added delivery and pickup services. The construction and manufacturing sectors of the economy were the only ones that grew in November, but the overall decline was smaller than most economists had forecast.

Still, the economic recovery that many thought would come once vaccinations began has been postponed, at least until the spring. Much of Britain is under a third lockdown (longer and stricter than the second), as a more contagious variant of the virus has strained the health care system, and economists are forecasting the economy to contract in the first quarter…