By Elliot Gulliver-Needham UK retail sales plummeted 3.2 per cent in December, well below analyst expectations and the largest monthly fall since January 2021 when coronavirus restrictions pushed down sales. Analysts had expected sales to fall by 0.5 per cent in the last month of the year, but asignificant drop in both food and non-food store sales pulled down volumes. Throughout all of 2023, sales volumes fell 2.8%, leaving them at their lowest level since 2018. Heather Bovill, deputy director for surveys and economic indicators at the Office for National Statistics, noted that food stores pe…