Robbie Stephens Analyst's Picks for a Tough Retail Season

Ah, but Christmas 1999 was so easy for retailers! Cover your bases with a couple of key product categories, sit back and watch the merchandise fly out the door.

"If you had a few fleece vests and some cargo pants, you were going to have a good season," Robertson Stephens analyst Janet Kloppenburg said Wednesday at her bank's consumer confab in New York. Not so this year, Kloppenburg said in her holiday outlook presentation to investors.

Now we're all sick of looking alike, she said, and far more interested in choosing individual items. We want that specific denim jacket we saw in that particular shop window, not just any old fleece vest, and we want it at a good price, too, because with the Nasdaq where it is, we're less willing to spend big. And this all assumes we want clothing at all; wireless devices and DVD players are increasingly likely to replace apparel on holiday wish lists, she said. ...