NEW YORK — Americans bought a sweater or two, ate out a little more, purchased some gadgets and turned to the Internet in search of bargains in January. These small indulgences nevertheless provided some relief to suffering stores, boosting retail sales by 1 percent.

The unexpected increase from December, reported by the Commerce Department on Thursday, reversed a six-month decline and marked the biggest increase in 14 months.

But it's far too early to break out the champagne. With nearly 5 million Americans still drawing unemployment benefits late last month and the specter of more layoffs to come, economists believe the reversal is unlikely to last. In a sign of how fearful businesses are, they slashed inventories in December by the biggest amount in seven years — potentially triggering further cutbacks in production and more layoffs.

Clearly, however, any lift in spending is worth watching.

"Consumers began to treat themselves a little better," said Joel Naroff, president and chief economist at Naroff Economic Advisors.

Whether this is a sign of a thaw in consumer spending or a blip, he said he won't know for another few months. But he said consumers, shell-shocked since the financial meltdown in September, might be moving from "doing nothing to doing a little something."

"I am not saying that people are going to love the recession, but people are going to learn to live with it," Naroff said.

The January figures were far better than the 0.8 percent decline that economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected.

"This is a big surprise, though the net rise in sales is less impressive than it looks because (December and November) were revised down by 0.3 percent each," Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, wrote in a research note. "The headline relief today is welcome, but it is unlikely to last."

Retail sales had plunged a revised 3 percent in December, which marked the weakest holiday season in several decades. Last week, the retail industry reported a 1.6 percent decline in same-store sales in January compared with a year earlier, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers-Goldman Sachs index. That figure — while grim — wasn't as bad as the 2 to 3 percent drop the group expected.

The Commerce Department report showed strong increases in sales of automobiles and in general merchandise stores.