Sales Are Off For Many Retailers, Even in New Hampshire

Erin Hershkowitz of the ICSC says there’s really no way to hide the bad news for 4th quarter retail sales.

This is one of the weakest holiday seasons that we’ve seen. This is a very weak holiday season compared to past years.

Hershkowitz says the reasons for the bad year are clear to anyone who pays attention to the news.

Consumer confidence is very low, unemployment is up and you know even the fact that gas prices did come down, it didn’t seem to boost consumer confidence all that much.

Several small retailers in Concord are also seeing fewer sales than anticipated.

Despite that, Art Learned at ‘Things are Cooking’ on Main Street says his store could be in far worse shape.

We’re down, but it’s not terrible, it really isn’t. and you know, if we hadn’t had this horrible weather on the weekend we would have been fine. But there’s nothing we can do about the weather. We’re just going to have to live with it, that’s all.

Like many national retailers, stores on Main Street have tried to lure in customers with discounted merchandise.

Some discounts in big and small stores have been pretty healthy.

Patty Patenaude runs a 2 year old clothing boutique called “Pisces”.

So I think people saw that they could get good deals here, two for one ‘cause they could buy two 50 dollar gift certificates for 50. That was my bailout…that did trickle down to consumers.

New Hampshire retailers didn’t deal with just snow over the past weekend.

They also had to cope with power outages and even some damage caused by the ice storm earlier this month.

Steve Boucher of the state’s Department of Resources and Economic Development says the December 11th storm cost businesses a lot in lost revenue.

The number that we’ve been given is 17 million, but it’s a really dishonest number, because that only represents a fraction of the businesses that have been calling into us, because a lot of them have called and said they have suffered loss of sales, loss of productivity loss of orders but they haven’t been able to categorize yet, what those damages are…

Not every store in New Hampshire is having a bad quarter.

On Concord’s Main Street, Pompanoosic Mills sells hand crafted furniture made in Vermont.

Manager Chuck Sykes says things have actually been pretty good.

We’re still ahead of last year. It’s dwindling, heh heh, but we’re still ahead of last year for the year, which is very good in this business and this economy….nationwide furniture stores and the furniture industry is really hurting because of the housing market being slow. So we’re, we’re plugging along.

Some other retailers have been doing well in the fourth quarter.

They include national discount retailers like Walmart, TJ Maxx and Target.

But with these and other retailers giving big discounts before Christmas, it’s likely that discounts could be even deeper after the holiday.