European retail sales dropped by the most on record in March as the worst recession since World War II battered the region and households curbed spending.

Store revenue in the euro area fell 4.2 percent from a year earlier, the biggest drop since the data series began in 1996, the European Union's statistics office in Luxembourg said yesterday.

The decrease was steeper than the 2.6 percent decline economists expected in a Bloomberg survey and followed a 4 percent drop in February. From the previous month, March sales fell 0.6 percent.