Shoppers dash to the last; busy, say malls in state

— Holiday shoppers descended on malls over the weekend and on Monday in a last-minute dash to buy gifts amid concerns about the nation’s economy and the impasse in Washington over taxes and spending.

Although fresh data on the Christmas-shopping season won’t be available until today, analysts expect growth from last year to be modest, with several factors dampening shoppers’ spirits, including fears that the economy could fall off the “fiscal cliff,” triggering early next year the tax increases and spending cuts that go by that name.

Consumer confidence fell in December to a five-month low, according to a report Friday. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index slid to 72.9, the weakest since July, from 82.7 in November.

In another sign that consumers pulled back, U.S. online sales increased 8.4 percent this holiday season, compared with last year’s almost 16 percent gain, MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse said.

Sales grew to $48 billion from Oct. 28 through Saturday, the Purchase, N.Y.-based research firm said yesterday. The figures come from the gifts they bought Monday while shopping at McCain Mall in North Little Rock.

60,000 Web retailers it tracks.

In Arkansas on Monday, spokesmen for three shopping malls reported strong shopper traffic in the last shopping days before Christmas.

In Little Rock, traffic at Park Plaza in Little Rock has been “very strong over the weekend,” Alicia Easley, a marketing specialist at the Little Rock mall, said by e-mail Monday.

Nationally, the shopping center industry expected a 4 percent increase in sales this Christmas-shopping season, Easley said. “Our feedback from merchants and shoppers leads us to believe that Park Plaza will enjoy an increase as well,” she said.

The mall has benefited from shoppers having a four-day weekend, including Christmas eve and Christmas, this year, Easley said.

David Faulkner, senior general manger at the Pinnacle Hills Promenade in Rogers, said business was brisk Monday, with most of the merchants he’s talked to reporting strong sales for the weekend going into Christmas.

Pinnacle Hills Promenade is the state’s largest mall, according to Green Street Advisors, a real-estate research firm.

Faulkner said good weather from September through December helped drive sales, with some retailers reporting 2012 sales doubling compared with the year before.

And Jeff Bishop, general manager at Northwest Arkansas Mall in Fayetteville, said in an e-mail that Monday’s shopping traffic was robust and that crowds have been larger this year compared with any of the past three Christmas seasons.

ShopperTrak, which counts foot traffic and its own proprietary sales numbers from 40,000 retail outlets across the country, last Wednesday cut its forecast for holiday spending down to 2.5 percent growth to $257.7 billion, from prior expectations of a 3.3 percent rise.

The 8.4 percent online sales gain from Oct. 28 through Saturday is below the online sales growth of between 15 to 17 percent seen in the prior 18-month period, according to SpendingPulse, which tracks all spending across all forms of payment, including cash.

Marshal Cohen, chief research analyst at the marketresearch firm NPD Inc., said retailers will have to be more aggressive than usual with discounts in the days after Christmas to get shoppers to spend. That could mean some stores will slash prices by as much as 80 percent to make shoppers believe that the sales are a “once in a lifetime opportunity.”

“Consumers are going to be rewarded for waiting until after the holidays,” he said.

Over the weekend, brickand-mortar retailers may havebenefited as promotions, extended hours and a dwindling delivery time range for late Web sales drew last-minute shoppers to stores.

“Super Saturday,” the industry’s term for the last Saturday before Christmas, may have rivaled the day after Thanksgiving, called Black Friday in the U.S., for the busiest shopping day of the year, said Michael McNamara, a vice president at SpendingPulse. Black Friday recorded total sales of $18.9 billion, he said.

An indication of how the weekend and the two-month holiday season fared will come today, when SpendingPulse plans to release its sales figures through Christmas eve.

The National Retail Federation has said holiday sales will rise 4.1 percent to about $586.1 billion this year, compared with a 5.6 percent gain in 2011. Sales for November and December account for 20 percent to 40 percent of U.S. retailers’ annual revenue, according to the Washington-based trade group. Last year’s fourth quarter generated 59 percent of Cincinnati-based Macy’s 2011 profit.

ShopperTrak, a Chicagobased researcher of store traffic, on Wednesday trimmed its forecast for November-December holiday sales to a gain of 2.5 percent from the prior estimate of 3.3 percent.Store closings after Hurricane Sandy and heavy discounting were crimping sales volumes, it said.

Sales at retailers’ stores open at least a year may climb 3 percent in November and December, slower than the 3.3 percent gain last year, the International Council of Shopping Centers reiterated on Dec. 18, in a forecast for the more than 25 chains it tracks. The council is predicting retailers will report a 4 percent to 4.5 percent comparable sales increase for December when they issue their latest monthly reports on Jan. 3.

Stores at the Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi, Mich., were seeing small sales increases overall as larger transactions were compensating for a drop in store visitors, Karen MacDonald, a spokesman for the mall’s operator Taubman Centers Inc., said in an e-mail Sunday. At the Stamford Town Center in Connecticut, stores were reporting that sales were “flat to up single digits” in percentage terms for the week, she said.

Information for this article was contributed by David Smith and John Magsam of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette ; by Cotten Timberlake, Lorraine Woellert, Renee Dudley and Lauren Coleman-Lochner of Bloomberg News, and by Candice Choi and Mae Anderson of The Associated Press.

Business, Pages 3 on 12/25/2012

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