Is This Growth an Urban Legend?

Urban Outfitters (NAS: URBN) recently surprised the street with unexpectedly strong earnings. This is good news for a company that has struggled in a tough space recently, but don't get too excited, because that growth isn't as impressive as it seems. Urban is including their ballooning online sales figures in their comparable retail sales figure here, and when you back out a rapidly growing online segment, the bricks and mortar stores are still putting up meek numbers. While it's good that online sales are growing so rapidly, they still only make up about 20% of total company sales, and realistically aren't enough to compensate for weak bricks and mortar sales at this time.

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