Dec 27, 2008

In effort to save the sales season, stores turn to discountsBy Carolyn ShapiroHamptonRoads.com

Soon after Uniquely Leo’s Ltd. opened at 10 a.m. Friday, a man came in with a shopping list from his wife.

That gave store owner Marcelyn Miller a flicker of hope through the gloom of recent weeks. Her downtown Suffolk gift shop hosted an after-Christmas sale as part of continuing efforts to entice reluctant shoppers to spend.

“Right now, for me, it’s all about cash flow,” Miller said. “I’m just trying to move inventory and generate cash.”

Miller and other retailers, small and large, are trying to capitalize on the weekend after Christmas to avoid a weak end to a dismal 2008 holiday shopping season. Some deemed the day after Christmas the “new Black Friday,” referring to the retail nickname for the day after Thanksgiving, which typically kicks off a month long spree and symbolically turns stores’ balance sheets from red to black.

“Our sense is that a lot of this has to do with the particularly soft, or weak, holiday season,” said Joseph Feldman, a retail analyst and managing director of Telsey Advisory Group, an equity research and consulting firm. Of the post-Christmas push, he added, “Nobody really planned for this.”

Traffic at MacArthur Center started out sparse but picked up toward noon, said Jim Wofford, general manager of the downtown Norfolk mall. “We’re starting to see a lot of folks, and we’re starting to see a lot of them with bags – more so than Christmas Eve,” Wofford said, adding that the mall’s merchants saw shoppers spending more on themselves than earlier in the season. “Most folks were very reluctant to go out and do a lot of personal buying prior to the holiday.”

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