Holiday sales reports fail to impress

The 2006 holiday season turned out to be unimpressive even as the nation’s stores got a boost from a post-Christmas buying spree in the final days of December, two reports confirmed Wednesday.

The International Council of Shopping Centers’ weekly sales index was up 0.3% for the week that ended Saturday compared with the previous week and rose 2.8% compared with the year-earlier period. The index is based on same-store sales, or sales at stores open at least a year, a key measure of a retailer’s health.

ShopperTrak RCT Corp., a Chicago-based research company that tracks sales at more than 45,000 stores, reported total retail sales for the week that ended Saturday rose 7.6% from a year earlier. Average weekly sales for December rose 4.5%, below the full season’s forecast for 5% growth.

ShopperTrak is scheduled to release the season’s final results next week.

After a robust start to the holiday season, many stores struggled with disappointing business in December, and a shopping surge in the final days before Christmas wasn’t strong enough to make up for lost sales. That’s why stores were counting even more on shoppers returning to stores right after Christmas to cash in their gift cards and buy discounted holiday goods.

“This past week, consumers provided retailers with some additional cheer as they began to cash in their gift cards,” said Michael P. Niemira, chief economist at International Council of Shopping Centers.

Still, he noted that for the day after Christmas, sales were off by about one-fifth from the corresponding day a year earlier because Dec. 26, unlike last year, was not a federal holiday.

Niemira still believes that December’s same-store sales growth will meet its reduced forecast of 2.5%. The original holiday forecast was for same-store sales to be up 2.5% to 3.5%.