Retailers hope Oahu shopping centers were jammed with people on the weekend after Thanksgiving. The questions are: Did they buy, and how much did they spend?
foot traffic will keep
registers jingling
There were shoppers aplenty,
but how much did they spend?By Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.comAs of late yesterday, those numbers were not available but one thing was clear, the "let's go shopping" attitude was everywhere and there were bargains galore, with discounts running around 70 percent and sometimes more.
"It was better than last year. I worked all weekend. There were a lot of people," said Laurie Hara, marketing director at Kahala Mall.
On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and traditionally the first day of the holiday shopping season, "there were lots of people, better than last year and the merchants showed positive signs," she said.
Retailers haven't added up all their cash register receipts, but there is a general feeling that it was "a very positive, rather surprising," start to the holiday season, given the effects of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. economy, said Carol Pregill, executive director of Retail Merchants of Hawaii, the local merchants' trade association.
But did huge traffic at the malls this past weekend generate business at the cash register?
Many businesses say it's too soon to tell. Others say volume means business and having the cash flow is important enough they will worry about profits later.
Hawaii's biggest mall, Ala Moana Center, saw its expected huge increase in traffic. Dwight Yoshimura, the center's general manager, said the opening of Macy's in the former Liberty House location, specials at the center's traditional anchor tenants such as Sears, J.C. Penney and Neiman Marcus as well as bargains at smaller individual merchants throughout the center brought in a lot of business.
Yoshimura said smaller merchants must have cut their profit margins to get their share of the business and he wondered about what will be left to cut on the next big discount day, the day after Christmas.
"Traffic-wise it was exceptional. Friday was a very busy day. A lot of it was Macy's opening," but that highly publicized event filtered through the entire center, he said.
Without question, Windward Mall had a huge customer volume over the weekend, said spokesman Jonathan Kim.
A lot of that may have been connected to the presence of the Signature Theatres complex -- showing "Harry Potter" among other films -- which wasn't there last year.
But the mall had thousands more visitors than it did on the same weekend last year and the merchants "as a whole did better than what they projected," Kim said.
"These first few days are encouraging, compared to the gloom and doom we've been hearing. I hope it continues," Kim said.
Macy's, the biggest new retailing influence in Hawaii, opened its stores Friday with big discounts and serious mark-downs of already discounted merchandise.
Macy's wasn't ready to disclose details but a spokeswoman said the company was pleased with the season so far. "We had a very strong weekend," said Rina Neiman, a Macy's media representative.
A more-detailed report came from Dana Harvey, a spokeswoman for Victoria Ward Centers. Some stores brought in extra merchandise in anticipation of good business and found that it worked. A number said sales exceeded expectations, but they had lowered their sights after the Sept. 11 disaster.
Everyone said business was good and for a few it was very good, with increases as high as 44 percent over the same time last year, she said.
With all the big Hawaii retailers discounting heavily it might seem hard to stay even with last year, when holiday shopping was well ahead of the previous year. But by one measure, the TeleCheck report, island stores more than managed to do that, at least on Friday, the first day of the big retail season.
Compared with activity in the same stores on the day after Thanksgiving last year, Hawaii sales were up 2.5 percent. That was a little above the national increase of 2.4 percent, according to the report from TeleCheck Services Inc., a leading check-acceptance company.
TeleCheck measures goods and services paid for by check and says that type of activity makes up nearly a third of all retail purchasing.
That has been questioned by some retailers, who see most of their business done by credit card, but the TeleCheck report at least gives a partial result that can be compared with previous years.
In that respect, Hawaii stores have done well this year with monthly numbers running 5.5 percent over the same month last year, leading the nation in gains in most months and slipping to 3.2 percent only in October, after the Sept. 11 hit on the U.S. economy.
TeleCheck called the national 2.4 percent increase for Friday "good news for retailers" and said it is in line with its own prediction of a total 2 percent increase for the 32-day shopping season leading up to Christmas.