Looking ahead to the holiday shopping season last October, David Riordan, co-owner of OOP! on Providence’s East Side and in the Providence Place mall, predicted the stores would be going “gangbusters.” Now, with the sales figures in, it seems he was right on target.
“I know in our industry that retailers said they did well, and we had a nice holiday at both stores,” said Riordan, whose stores sell handcrafted and quirky gifts. “It was one of our best ever at Providence Place – and at the new location, people finally found us.”
Across Rhode Island, retailers reported about a 5-percent increase in sales compared with 2005, said Paul DeRoche, executive director of the Rhode Island Retail Federation. That’s less than the 5.5-percent jump he had predicted last October, but better than the national average.
Nationwide, the National Retail Federation reported this month, holiday sales were up 4.4 percent, less than the 5-percent increase the group had predicted in October and well below the 6.1-percent increase it saw from 2004 to 2005.
“We saw strong retail sales in 2006, but as 2006 progressed, we saw a turn, a downshift, in the amount consumers were spending on apparel and on building materials,” said Kathy Grannis, spokeswoman for the NRF.
“The weather played a major role,” Grannis added. “It was nice to see that there was a gain in apparel, but there was clothing that wasn’t selling because of the warm winter. There were sweaters and winter coats that were not being snapped up. And there’s no denying that housing materials [sales] were higher last year.”
In Rhode Island, De Roche said he believed the weather actually helped sales, even if it did have an effect on apparel. “We had a great Christmas,” he said. “The weather brought more people out the last two weeks of December than we expected.”
De Roche said there was also “a large surge” in the last two weeks in electronics sales. Grannis agreed that electronics were an integral part of the season’s success nationwide. “Electronics were the big winners,” she said. “A large majority of the purchases were flat-screen TVs, gaming systems and laptops.”
In fact, December sales at electronics and appliance stores were up
13.7 percent, unadjusted for inflation, the NRF reported. Sales at health and personal care stores, which were considered “very robust,”
were 8.6 percent higher than a year earlier. Apparel sales, on the other hand, increased by only 3 percent, while building materials and household equipment sales declined by 4.3 percent.
Along with strong overall sales, Riordan noticed another trend this year at OOP!
“The Web site was phenomenal,” he said. “In December 2006, we had
27,068 visits to our Web site. Our December 2005 visits were maybe 7,000. It’s still a small portion of the business, but it’s the first time it made me look at it and say, ‘This is something to pay attention to.’ ”
Looking ahead to the first half of 2007, the NRF is expecting a modest increase in sales.
“We’re forecasting a 4.8-percent increase in retail sales for 2007,”
Grannis said. “That is a subdued number from what we’ve seen in previous years. But we’re expecting the second half of 2007 to see a little bit more robust spending by the consumers.”
