No ‘Measurable Impact’ on Holiday Sales Expected from Blizzard—NPD
“It’s not likely” that a one- or two-day pause in holiday shopping from the weekend blizzard that dumped up to two feet of snow on the East Coast “will cause measurable impact on the final holiday sales volume,” Stephen Baker, NPD’s vice president of industry analysis, said Tuesday on the company blog. The regions hardest hit, New England and the Mid-Atlantic, accounted for 18 percent of sales the first 10 months of the year, he said.
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The Saturday and Sunday before Christmas, when the storm hit, “are two of the busiest” holiday shopping days of the season, Baker said. But he predicted that the storm will “have a limited impact” on technology product sales because of the calendar and “the high percentage of online shopping” in the category. It should help that a number of retailers sent e-mails telling customers about shipping deals and expedited delivery for online orders, he said.
Because Christmas falls on a Friday this year, “the industry has an entire week of shopping days to give consumers time to catch up,” Baker said. Anecdotal reports indicate that “consumers have already been out in droves on Monday to catch up on the missed shopping days,” he said. In northern Virginia, where Baker lives and where 20 inches of snow fell, “there were reports of gridlock at area malls including waits of 60 minutes to exit mall parking lots,” he said. But Jon Myer, the CEO of CE specialty retail chain Myer-Emco in the Washington, D.C., area, told us Monday he wasn’t optimistic about being able to recoup all sales lost to the storm (CED Dec 22 p1). “My experience is we typically get 60 percent back from a storm closing,” he said. ‘I don’t expect much more.”
ComScore on Tuesday became the latest research company to say online sales spiked because of the storm. Holiday- season spending online has been $25.5 billion, a 4-percent increase from the comparable period last year, it said. Sales last weekend, the final one of the season, grew 13 percent from the weekend before Christmas 2008. The blizzard “prompted many consumers to finish their holiday shopping from the confines of their own homes,” comScore said. Online sales the week ended Sunday increased 6 percent, setting a record for any week, with more than $4.8 billion in spending, it said. Retailers were “very aggressive with late season promotions while informing consumers that they could still get their purchases shipped in time for Christmas, and these tactics seem to be paying off,” said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. A day earlier, Coremetrics said U.S. online sales increased 14.6 percent the week ended Sunday from the comparable week a year earlier, and they rose 24 percent Friday and Saturday.