Winter Holidays

PHILADELPHIA — Five Below has proposed a secondary offering of 7,000,000 shares of its common stock, amid reports that sales are not as bad as originally feared.

New York -- A report released Wednesday by MasterCard revealed that Canadian retail sales, which grew just 1.6% in December, trailed the U.S., which also posted less than stellar results for the month.

Sales in the U.S. advanced 2.4% in December.

Canada’s results were particularly disappointing, considering the country’s December sales grew 4.3% in December 2011, according to MasterCard’s SpendingPulse report.

PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. — According to global information company the NPD Group, consumers rewarded the U.S. retail toy industry with a strong December.

Based on data from the NPD Group’s Retail Tracking Service, many shoppers waited until the last two weeks of December to do their holiday toy shopping. Looking at those two weeks, dollar sales were up 18%and unit sales were up 10% when compared to the same time period in 2011.  

Wayne, N.J. -- The Toys “R” Us Children’s Fund announced it has made a $1 million donation to the Hurricane Sandy New Jersey Relief Fund, created by New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie and First Lady Mary Pat Christie to aid, comfort and rebuild the Garden State in the wake of the devastation that impacted so many children and families.
 

New York -- Total holiday retail sales increased 3% to $579.8 billion, below the National Retail Federation s projected forecast of 4.1%. Non-store holiday sales grew 11%, below the 12% growth forecast by Shop.org. (The NRF sales figures exclude automobiles, gas stations and restaurants.)

“For over six months, we’ve been saying that the fiscal cliff and economic uncertainty could impact holiday sales. As the number shows, these issues had a visible impact on consumer spending this holiday season,” said Matthew Shay, CEO, NRF.

In December, the retailers that increased their page counts were balanced out by those that decreased their page counts. However, of those retailers that did reduce their page counts, only two also reduced the number of inserts distributed by more than 2%. 

Keeping with their November strategy, Walmart continued its aggressive promotions this month, and has shown a significant increase in both drop of flyer and pages per flyer. They showed the highest growth compared to other advertisers in page counts, and the second highest growth in number of flyers.

Minneapolis -- Best Buy Co. on Friday reported revenue of $12.8 billion for the nine weeks ended January 5, 2013, compared with $12.9 billion for the nine weeks ended December 31, 2011. Online revenue rose 10%.

Same-store sales were down 1.4%.  Domestic same-store sales were flat, but fell 6.4% internationally.

Strength in the computing, mobile phone and appliance categories enabled Best Buy to report flat same store sales during the holidays and temporarily silence the voice of those who had prematurely written the company’s obituary.