was taken, but business picked up
later.
Santa has come and gone with a decidedly mixed bag of holiday cheer — and some retailers got a lump of coal.
At the season’s beginning, there was a strange feeling in the air. Shoppers seemed to be looking, not buying, although sale signs were up everywhere — 20, 30, 40 percent off — even in the earliest weeks of the season. As the weeks passed, the specials became more plentiful and the sales greater. But area crowds seemed thin, even in the final days before Christmas, although according to the National Retail Federation (NRF) and RCT Systems, Inc., 72.1 million consumers visited U.S. malls and 90 million shopped at department stores on Saturday, December 23, 2000, making it the busiest day of this holiday season.
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According to the same report, traffic for the fourth full week of the holiday season (December 17 to December 23) was up 16.1 percent in malls over the same week in 1999, and up 16.4 percent in department stores; the first three weeks of the season were down from 1999.
“It’s not that it was bad, it’s that it wasn’t as good — there’s a big difference,” said Leonard Lardaro, University of Rhode Island professor of economics. “People get so used to home runs, and all of a sudden they double and get upset. I think it’s safe to say that around the country, there was a lot of discounting this
year.”
Sales at mall specialty stores this holiday increased 2.2 percent in comparison to 1999, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC). The ICSC holiday report tracks sales from more than 4,000 specialty stores in 78 regional malls across the United States. The national sample does not include department stores and other mall anchors.
This year’s ICSC increase may be significantly lower than 1999’s (7.7 percent), but according to Providence Place General Manager Joe Koechel, the mall considerably bettered the ICSC’s sales comparisons. Koechel said Providence Place had a ten to 19 percent sales increase over last year.
“We were very happy with the holiday season,” he said.
Koechel attributed the mall’s holiday success to the confluence of several factors: all three of Providence Place’s anchor stores were in place; twice the number of stores were open this holiday as compared to last; the mall’s movie theaters were open; and the exit ramp off Route 95 and the sky bridge from the Westin were completed.
“All those factors came into play and I think we really flexed our muscle during the holiday time,” he said.
Koechel predicted that this type of momentum, coupled with the recent attention given to the City of Providence and the planned openings of five to ten new stores at the mall this spring, will propel Providence Place into the new year on a positive note.
“We’re optimistic,” Koechel said. “I think we could even improve on 2000.”
According to a report issued by retail giant Wal-Mart on the day after Christmas, sales occurred late in the holiday period, with the Saturday before Christmas being the chain’s second largest sales day of the year.
The company’s five-week reporting period runs from November 25 through December 29, excluding sales made the day after Thanksgiving. This, combined with the fact that this year’s sales are compared to a period when shoppers were stockpiling for Y2K, results in a difficult comparison, according to the report.
Uneven comparison or not, the result is the same: based on sales during the holiday period, Wal-Mart projects lower comparative sales for the month of December.
Two former retail stalwarts will not survive after a difficult holiday season:
After 128 years in business, Chicago-based Montgomery Ward & Company will cease operations in 30 states, closing 250 stores and displacing 28,000 workers.
And in Braintree, Massachusetts, where discount chain Bradlees has its headquarters, the company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and expects to liquidate assets over the next two months. The company has 9,800 employees, primarily in the Northeast.
“If companies don’t have a well-defined niche, they lose,” Lardaro said. “Some stores did extremely well . . . Others will start having problems.”
Online, 31.8 million unique (counted only once) visitors went to online retail sites during the week before Christmas (week ending December 24, 2000), a decrease of 10.9 percent since the holiday season’s peak of 35.6 million unique visitors (week two, ending December 3, 2000), according to New York-based Media Metrix, which tracks Internet and digital media measurement worldwide.
Compared to the same week last year, however, the Media Metrix Online Shopping
Index — which aggregates Web visitors from both home and work to nearly 400 retail
sites and 18 retail subcategories — was up by 28.4 percent.
