RETAILING : Grinch-Like Glimpse Sees Slow Retailers’ Christmas

With just 201 shopping days left till Christmas, a retailing economist Monday hazarded a somewhat gloomy guess about what the holiday shopping season holds in store for merchants.

“The fourth quarter will be tough,” Rosalind Wells, chief economist for the National Retail Merchants Assn., said at the opening session of the trade group’s midyear conference at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. “I’m skeptical that holiday sales will pick up much momentum.”

Lackluster sales would prove troublesome for retailers, she said, if they expect a repeat of last year’s performance, when they scored an unexpectedly high 8% sales gain over Christmas, 1987. If they buy too much merchandise in anticipation of a spending boom, she said, they could get stuck with leftovers.

That, however, would please bargain hunters by increasing the chance that stores will offer early markdowns.

Wells predicted sales growth of only 5% for the fourth quarter, partly because of a slowing economy and partly because merchants’ results will be compared to last year’s surprisingly robust results.

The opening session of the conference attracted only about 70 people. By contrast, at the NRMA’s biggest conference, held each January in New York, hundreds of delegates crowd into a huge ballroom at the Hilton to hear economists’ predictions.