Short Shopping Season Not Sweet for Retailers
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Hemera/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — A shorter holiday season this year will potentially cost retailers some big bucks.
Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst at Adobe Digital Index, says in a new report that businesses dependent on holiday sales will lose about $1.5 billion in revenue due to six fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Actually, there’s more than that going against retailers this year. The 16-day government shutdown in October hurt a lot of people in the pocket book while lackluster hiring continues to take a bite out of the economy.
But even with all these drawbacks, the National Retail Federation predicts sales at traditional stores are expected to be up over 4 percent from the same period in 2012 while online purchases could see an increase of 15 percent.
Just the same, consumers have probably already noticed that “holiday creep” has started earlier than normal with Macy’s and other retailers announcing they’ll be open Thanksgiving night for the first time. Meanwhile, major discounters such as Target and Walmart have started featuring pre-Black Friday price cuts.
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