U.S. retailers see holiday sales weakest since 2008

Anna Domanska
Industry Leasers
Dec 26, 2012

Despite huge lines recorded on Black Friday, the U.S. retailers understood that Americans were not so keen on opening their wallets during the 2012 holiday shopping season. Cautiousness of American customers resulted in the worst holiday shopping season since 2008 when the country entered a recession. Analysts note that weather conditions and concerns over the economy including the fiscal cliff were the main factors of unsatisfactory results of U.S. holiday sales.

Gloomy holiday sales

On the 25^th of December, data released by MasterCard Inc.’s SpendingPulse unite, showed that sales between the 28^th of October and the 24^th of December rose only 0.7 percent, compared to the same period a year ago. Experts had estimated that U.S. holdiays sales would climb between 3 percent and 4 percent. The growth of 0.7 percent is well below  the initial forecasts. But those results came not long after ShopperTrak decided to downgrade its 2012 holiday growth forecast to 2.5 percent.

According to data, the growth in holiday sales is the worst since 2008 when U.S. saw sales drop between 2 and 4 percent as the financial crisis just started. In 2011, the U.S. holiday sales climbed between approximately 5 percent. Analysts believe that an increase of 4 percent is satisfactory for an economy.

More interestingly, online sales for the holiday season increased by almost 8.5 percent to $48 billion, according to SpendingPulse. The figures are disappointing as the online sale increase of 15 to 17 percent was witnessed in the last 18 months.

Full article here

This article was posted: Wednesday, December 26, 2012 at 7:04 am

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