Winter Holidays

Specialty retailer Five Below offered a somewhat muted outlook for holiday sales despite posting impressive growth in third-quarter same-store sales and achieving record expansion in 2013.

The company has opened 60 new stores this year and its same-store sales grew 9% during the period ended Nov. 2. Of the new stores opened this year, 28 came online during the third quarter and 11 of those were in Dallas, a new market for the rapidly expanding company.

Washington, D.C. -- The retail industry will lose an estimated $8.76 billion to return fraud this year, and $3.39 billion during the holiday season alone, according to the National Retail Federation’s 2013 Return Fraud Survey. Overall, 5.8% of holiday returns are fraudulent, up slightly from 4.6% last year.

Anaheim, Calif. – Pacific Sunwear experienced explosive growth in net income during the third quarter of fiscal 2013, skyrocketing to $17.2 million from $948,000.

Net sales fell 4% to $206.6 million from $215.5 million, while same-store sales grew 1%.

Charleston, S.C. -- Despite some early negative reaction to stores opening on Thanksgiving, shoppers ultimately embraced the idea of an extended “Black Friday” and came out for a full weekend of spending, according to the Christmas & Holiday Shopping Forecast released by America's Research Group and Inmar. Survey results show almost three-quarters of shoppers spent part of at least one day of the weekend in stores.

Genesco, the company behind Lids and Journeys, is the latest company to express concern about the holiday season and lower fourth-quarter expectations after producing a solid third-quarter performance.

Waldorf, Germany -- Black Friday social mentions more than doubled those of Cyber Monday this year. But a new infographic from SAP shows that consumers felt the most excited and happy about Cyber Monday.

Atlanta -- Year-over-year retail dollar volume growth during Thanksgiving and Black Friday was strong at 9.0%, and a significant increase compared to last year’s growth of 5.6%, according to First Data Corp.’s SpendTrend analysis, which tracks same-store consumer spending by credit, signature debit, PIN debit, EBT, closed-loop prepaid cards and checks at U.S. merchant locations.

Ottawa, Ontario -- Black Friday deep discounts could be a myth, with only a few retailers dropping prices on only a few categories. Some key findings from pricing intelligence technology provider 360pi based on Amazon's own assortment in eight categories, including TVs, video games, tablets and digital cameras, show that: