December Sales End on High Note
Cold weather and post-Christmas bargains made cash registers ring during the last week of December.
Weekly retail sales increased 0.6 percent in the final week of the month compared with the previous week, according to an index of chain retail stores kept by the International Council of Shopping Centers and Goldman Sachs. Compared with the same week last year, sales increased a solid 2.7 percent, said Michael Niemira, the ICSC’s chief economist.
“Weather also played an important factor this week as snow and cold weather drove demand for seasonal apparel and snow-removal products,” he said.ICSC initially forecast that December’s retail sales would increase more than 4 percent.
Some economists and retail analysts forecast some disappointment for December sales. Ken Perkins of Retail Metrics predicted a modest 2.5 percent increase in same-store sales for December. That would have marked the weakest performance since December 2008, when same-store sales declined 3.5 percent and retailers suffered through some of the tough times of the Great Recession, according to the Boston-area independent research firm.
The holiday season’s retail sales were shaken by anxiety of the “fiscal cliff,” the proposed series of steep federal tax hikes and major cuts in government spending that had been set to go into effect on Jan. 1. Lawmakers reached a compromise deal late on New Year’s Day.
Also, retailers said that shoppers’ attention was diverted from their holiday gift lists because of devastation from Hurricane Sandy, which wreaked havoc through the eastern seaboard before the holiday and because of grief from the massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14.—Andrew Asch
