Retail lifted by the holidays
Despite a snowstorm on the Saturday before Christmas, among the busiest shopping days of the year, retailers in Fairfield County and the tri-state area appeared to have a better holiday till than some expected.
At Agabhumi, the Best of Bali, sales were up 23 percent from a year earlier for the period beginning with Black Friday after Thanksgiving through Dec. 28. The company imports goods from the Indonesian province of Bali for sale at stores in Stamford, Westport, Santa Monica, Calif., and Barbados.
For proprietors Michael and Regina Kirshbaum, it was a welcome rebound from 2008 when a pair of storms similarly crimped sales amid the arctic chill of the recession”™s onset.
“It was extremely frustrating, because at that time we had the best merchandising we had ever had,” Regina Kirshbaum recalled of the 2008 holiday shopping season. “It was really discouraging.”
By comparison, she added, 2009 was a banner year, and the company was able to avoid deep discounting by closely managing inventory orders in the months leading up to Christmas.
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That was a similar strategy followed by retailers large and small, according to the National Retail Federation, which is not expected to release its final tally of holiday sales until mid-January. The 2008 holiday shopping season was 2.8 percent lower than in 2007, according to NRF, a dip retailers hope to have avoided this year after MasterCard International Inc. indicated its own data showed retail sales were up 3.6 percent for the 2009 holiday season.
Across the New York border, store owners gave the holiday season a grade of B minus, according to the Retail Council of New York State, compared with a C minus grade in the 2008 holiday season.
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Nearly three in four retailers polled said their sales the week before Christmas at least matched those for the same week in 2008. Post-Christmas activity also appeared to have improved over last year, though not for all ”“ 58 percent of merchants reported “even or improved” sales after Christmas compared with a year earlier.
“We could hear the relief in many members”™ voices,” said James Sherin, CEO of the Retail Council. “It wasn”™t a year of huge growth, but it was still a solid improvement over 2008 ”¦ Merchants ordered less inventory than prior years and stocked practical, lower-priced merchandise that was attractive to this year”™s frugal shopper.”
Appearing on CNBC, National Retail Federation spokesman Scott Krugman said the trade group does not expect consumers to be able to sustain the spending surge given continued high unemployment, and that retail sales will back off to necessity purchases.
“The luxury market was clearly the first group hurt by the collapse of the financial market, but with Wall Street, the banking industry coming back, they appear to be the first area that”™s recovering,” Krugman said. “In a tough economic environment, sometimes you have the higher end that is recession proof, which they were this year, but not last year; and of course then you have discounters which thrive as people trade down. So you have those mid-tier retailers getting squeezed, in a way, between diamonds and discounts.”
Retail”™s Big Show, NRF”™s annual convention, is scheduled for Jan. 10-13 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City.