Holiday Retail Sales Wintry
Bad weather in much of the nation put the brakes on the holiday’s final-weekend shopping surge, leaving retailers’ remaining hopes for best sales pinned to their post-Christmas week sales, which customarily account for around 11 percent of the overall holiday total.
Boxing Day (Dec. 26) had barely come and gone when analysts were calling holiday Y2K the worst in at least a decade. An initial estimate put the average retailer’s year-to-year increase at just 3 percent.
Immediately after the final holiday weekend, Cincinnati-based Federated Department Stores, Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based Sears, Roebuck & Co., Minneapolis-based Target Corp. and Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. all said they were revising their December same-store sales estimates downward. Their pre-holiday estimates were modest enough: 3 percent for Federated, 1-to-2 percent for Sears, 5 percent for Target and 3-to-5 percent for Wal-Mart, according to reports. For example, Target was predicting that its December sales would be “way below plan,” according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Holiday check writing was also down, according to TeleCheck Service’s tally. Check writing, which typically accounts for approximately one-third of all holiday spending, rose approximately 3.2 percent, half of last year’s increase, according to TeleCheck. And Merrill Lynch forecast a holiday sales gain of only 2.4 percent, also the worst in at least a decade, according to post-holiday wrap-ups in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
Meanwhile, holiday Y2K looked as if it would be particularly happy for European retailers, according to a survey by The Wall Street Journal that found Spanish retailers predicting a 7 percent increase over last year and French department stores Au Printemps and Galeries Lafayette tallying 15 percent and 8 percent increases, respectively.
Consumer traffic through Dec. 24 at U.S. malls was up 4.8 percent and at department stores just 2 percent over last holiday, according to data compiled for the National Retail Federation.
