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Holiday Season Off to Modest Start

The Associated Press

NEW YORK -- The Thanksgiving shopping weekend doesn't appear to have been the disaster some had feared, but consumers' tempered buying and stores' unprecedented deep discounts are likely to result in sales that at best met retailers' low expectations.

Now, the nation's merchants are struggling to find other tricks to entice financially strapped shoppers for the rest of the holiday shopping season, expected to be the weakest in decades.

"The consumer clearly is showing us that there is a holiday to be had, but the consumer wants bigger deals. And they are not panicking," said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD Group, a market research group. "They're willing to wait it out at almost any price."

Cohen predicts sales for the weekend, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, were at best even with the same holiday weekend a year ago.

New York-based retail consultant Walter Loeb said he expects sales for the weekend to be below year-ago levels, based on discussions this weekend with key executives from discounters and department stores.

But he added, "It wasn't as bad as some feared. ... People were buying, but they bought cheap, and the results were not as good."

Loeb, like many analysts who predict a rare contraction in spending for the holidays from a year ago, expects a 1% drop in total retail sales for the November and December period, compared with the year-ago period.

Karen MacDonald, a spokeswoman at Taubman Centers(TCO Quote), which operates 24 malls in 11 states, said that based on a sampling of malls, business on Friday was anywhere from unchanged to up mid-single digits. But on Saturday, sales were unchanged to down slightly.

A more complete sales picture of how the Thanksgiving shopping weekend fared won't be known until Thursday, when the nation's retailers report November same-store sales, or sales at stores opened at least a year.

According to preliminary figures released Saturday by ShopperTrak RCT, a research firm that tracks total retail sales at more than 50,000 outlets, sales rose 3% to $10.6 billion on Friday from the Black Friday a year ago.

ShopperTrak RCT is expected to release data for the combined Friday and Saturday period on Monday. Bill Martin, ShopperTrak's co-founder, said he wasn't sure if the momentum was sustained through the rest of the weekend.

Meanwhile, according to early estimates from the National Retail Federation, shoppers spent about 7% more on average this year during Black Friday weekend.

Black Friday -- the day after Thanksgiving -- is considered one of the busiest shopping days of the year and the official start of the holiday shopping season.