Retail Sales Hopping Even With Late Easter

Despite a later Easter selling season this year, some of the nation’s big retailers today reported healthy March sales.

Executives of several major general merchandise, department store and apparel chains said they are satisfied with their results. In a few cases, sales exceeded the retailers’ expectations.

The March tallies were measured against a year earlier when stores benefited from a traditional upswing in shopping ahead of Easter as customers hunted for new outfits and other spring items. Easter falls three weeks later this year than it did in 1989.

But it appears that this year shoppers ignored the calendar and started freshening up their warm weather wardrobes early. Mild temperatures in parts of the country may have put them in the mood.

Apparel sales outpaced other types of merchandise in March, continuing a pattern that has prevailed for more than a year. Sales of hard goods, such as expensive household appliances, were soft.

Mediocre economic growth has kept consumers cautious about spending heavily or going deeper into debt to finance costly purchases. Car buying, for instance, has been very sluggish.

One of the standouts was Wal-Mart Stores. The Bentonville, Ark.-based discounter posted a 27% March sales spurt to $2.43 billion from $1.92 billion a year earlier. Results excluding sales at stores opened within the year were up 12%.

Tallies at stores open a year or longer, called same- or comparable-store sales, give the best indication of a retailer’s performance. Analysts and store operators say the excitement of new openings can temporarily inflate sales.

Another retailer that fared respectably was Woolworth Corp., the New York-based parent of numerous specialty stores including Foot Locker athletic shoe shops.

Domestic sales totaled $476 million in the five weeks ended March 31, down 1% from $481 million a year earlier. Same-store sales were off a steeper 3.7%. Including foreign sales, Woolworth had a 2.5% increase in total March sales.

But Harold E. Sells, Woolworth’s chairman and chief executive officer, said the domestic results “exceeded our plan, and while total sales for the period showed only a small gain over the prior-year period, they were satisfactory considering the fact that last year’s March results included the important Easter selling season.”

Analysts were reluctant to read much significance into the March figures. They said they will reserve judgment on how the retailing industry is doing until they see the April results.