The waiting to determine just how good a Christmas this will be is about over for the nation’s retailers.
And it’s beginning to look as if it will be worth the wait.
Surveys by the International Council of Shopping Centers indicate that U.S. sales already are up more than 6.4 percent from the year-earlier period (the Christmas shopping season officially began Nov. 25). And a survey released this week by Visa USA Inc. indicates that 20 percent of Americans haven’t even begun to shop.
“There are a lot of factors that are unique to this year,” said Jan Soderstrom, senior vice president for Visa. “There is a whole shopping weekend you wouldn’t have, because Christmas falls on Sunday this year.”
Tom Tashjian, retail analyst with First Manhattan of New York, says that the extra day of shopping on Saturday, Christmas Eve, can be quantified.
“An extra day of holiday shopping can generate another 3 percent increase in apparel sales and an extra 1 percent in general merchandise sales,” according to Tashjian.
Those extra sales may be what’s needed to push this year’s Christmas shopping season to the point where it surpasses last year’s 7.6 percent increase. Sales in 1992 were up 7.7 percent, while in 1991 they were up an anemic 0.4 percent.
Retailers who normally await the panic-stricken male shopper willing to buy anything in sight soon could be faced with the panic-stricken female as well, both realizing that Christmas is upon them.
The holiday shopping season is critical to the survival of many retailers who say that 60 percent of their sales occur during the four-week period after Thanksgiving.
The season seemed to get off to a fast start the weekend after Thanksgiving but then proceeded to fall flat. Now it looks like it will end on an up note.
There have been plenty of people in the stores since Thanksgiving, but their spending hasn’t increased much. Mitsubishi Bank and Wertheim Schroder, which produce a weekly retail study, said sales from Nov. 27 through Dec. 10 were running only slightly ahead of November sales.
In their latest measure Tuesday, they said sales among the nation’s retailers improved slightly in the next-to-last week before Christmas. Many companies made increasing use of discounts to drum up sales, the report said.
Same-store sales increased 0.1 percent in the week ended Saturday from the previous week, when sales were unchanged, their report said, adding that December same-store sales are likely to be 5 to 5.5 percent above a year ago. Same-store sales are sales at stores open at least a year.
The slow start to the holiday season has been blamed in part on unseasonably warm weather that lasted until early December in much of the country, leaving retailers with stacks of cold-weather goods they needed to sell.
But it’s also a function of shoppers’ changing habits. There are fewer early birds out there these days, retailers and analysts say, as people increasingly do their shopping as late as possible.
It’s a trend that’s confirmed by the Visa study.
Even the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche, in its survey of 1,000 consumers, found respondents saying they still had 20 percent of their shopping to do.
Consumers thus far have spent an average of $577, with the majority planning to spend a total of $724 on holiday gifts.
“So far, consumer spending is on target with our survey conducted before Thanksgiving,” said Harvey D. Braun, co-chairman of the Retail & Distribution Services Group of Deloitte & Touche.
The big winners appear to be discount and electronics stores and mail order outlets, according to Visa and MasterCard.
Visa said its Holiday Spendtrak shows charges have risen 22.8 percent since Nov. 25, compared with a year earlier, to a total of $16.81 billion. MasterCard said its U.S. Smart Money Watch reported a nearly 30 percent increase in charges, to $11.99 billion.
While it doesn’t mean sales are up more than 20 percent, it does show a willingness to charge more of the purchases rather than paying with cash or check, according to Soderstrom.
According to the shopping center council, while sales overall were up 6.4 percent, sales during the third week of the holiday shopping season were up 3.4 percent.
The shopping center council survey, based on an analysis of sales at 5,000 stores at 85 regional malls nationwide, showed that jewelry and home furnishings continued to lead the big-ticket sales categories.
According to the analysts, jewelry sales were up 10 percent while home furnishings were up 6 percent.
The council said shoe sales were up 5.5 percent, food sales 6.6 percent, sales of cards, gifts and books 8.7 percent and home entertainment sales 4.6 percent.
While the council’s survey covers 85 malls, it doesn’t include the department stores or home electronics stores that now border most malls.
“It looks like this might be a very Merry Christmas after all,” said one store owner.
