Spending Declines Moderate

December 14, 2008  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in Retail Technology on December 15, 2008 Furniture was among specialty retail categories that showed holiday spending declines in the most recent report issued by Spending Pulse, a retail data service owned by MasterCard. It covered the period from Black Friday (Nov. 28) through Dec. 6.

Furniture, as well as electronics and apparel, declined steeply, but SpendingPulse Vice President Michael McNamara told Reuters that the numbers could indicate declines are leveling off.

"Before things get better, they have to stop getting worse. These ranges seem to indicate that perhaps things have stopped getting worse," McNamara said.

As an example, specialty chains that sell furniture saw sales decline 23.5 percent from Nov. 1 to Dec. 6, but the decline moderated slightly to 23 percent when analysts tallied the figures since Black Friday. In specialty electronics, a sales decline of 24.9 percent (Nov. 1 to Dec. 6) has moderated to 22.3 percent since Black Friday.  In the apparel sector, sales worsened. Sales were down 22.9 percent since Nov. 28 in apparel, which is a bigger drop than the the 19.5 decline in the Nov. 1-to-Dec. 6 period.  

A lone bright spot is in e-commerce sales, which posted a 10.4 percent gain over last year in the week after Thanksgiving. However, e-commerce sales are down 4.8 percent for the season thus far since the current shopping season is shorter, with only 27 days between Black Friday and Christmas (versus 32 days last year).