Yahoo's headlines. I wonder how this will affect the markets this week? Seems like bad news to me. -------------------------------------------------- Shoppers Crowd Stores but Spend Modestly NEW YORK - The 2005 holiday shopping season got off to only a modest start over the Thanksgiving weekend as consumers responded initially to aggressive discounting and then retreated. "There was a lot of hype, a lot of promotions and lot of people, but the results were on the lukewarm side," said Michael P. Niemira, chief economist at the International Council of Shopping Centers, estimating that the weekend's sales results were down from a year ago. He said heavy markdowns forced retailers to sell more goods in order to meet sales targets. Analysts said there was heavy shopper traffic early Friday when stores opened even earlier than usual for the day after Thanksgiving, offering deep, deep discounts. When the early-bird specials were over, consumers lost their enthusiasm.
Perhaps not good for the guys who are exclusively bricks and mortar, but it appears on-line purchases have been through the roof.
Down 1% from last year: "ShopperTrak, which measures purchases at 45,000 mall-based merchants, found that sales for the day after Thanksgiving fell 0.9 percent from last year, to $8.01 billion." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/business/27cnd-retail.html
All the news services just put up a story sales good based on a survey of planned spending. http://money.cnn.com/2005/11/27/news/economy/holiday_shopping/index.htm?cnn=yes