Customers flock to sales after weak shopping season

NEW YORK -- Shoppers flocked to stores for post-Christmas sales Thursday as merchants sought to clear out leftovers and salvage something from what could be the weakest shopping season in at least 30 years.

Still, the question remains: How much can the barrage of discounts boost holiday spending, if already-deep discounts before Dec. 25 failed to entice shoppers?

"I'm strictly a sale person. If I buy something today and come back and find it on sale, I'm going to bring it back and buy it at the sale price," said Leila Cooper, a retired cafeteria worker who had just bought two sweatshirts at the Oakwood Shopping Center in New Orleans.

At a Wal-Mart in Columbus, Ohio, York and Marla Ingels of New Haven, W.Va., selected two artificial Christmas trees.

"It's a good time to pick them up when they are 75 percent off," said York Ingels. "We're heading to the mall next."

Despite a better-than-expected sales surge following Thanksgiving, customers have been frugal, uninspired by the lack of must-have items and worried about the economy. Also, the shopping season was six days shorter than it was a year ago.

Wal-Mart Stores, the world's largest retailer, said Thursday that it has reduced its December forecast for sales at stores open at least a year. Those figures are known as same-store sales.

There were some bright spots.

According to BizRate.com, a comparison shopping site that tracks sales at 2,000 Web sites, online sales from Nov. 1 through Dec. 23 grew 41 percent to $12 billion from $8.48 billion a year ago.

Amazon.com said that it had its busiest holiday season ever, with more than 56 million items ordered worldwide since November.

Still, Michael P. Niemira, vice president of Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Ltd., expects same-store sales for the combined November and December period to be up only 1.5 percent from the year before.

That would be the weakest increase since the same-store index started tracking the data in 1970.

And the National Retail Federation this week scaled back its forecast for total holiday sales, which exclude the restaurant and auto categories. It now expects sales to be up 3.5 percent, instead of 4 percent.

But the association is not giving up hope.

The final week of December "can definitely help and turn it into a decent holiday season," said Scott Krugman, a federation spokesman. "Shoppers always seem to surprise us."