Seasonal

Boston – College students are planning to buy holiday gifts that offer experiential value or economic flexibility and will frequent discount stores, according to a new survey of roughly 1,000 college students from consumer marketing firm Fluent.

Famous footwear may have generated record third quarter sales, but parent company Brown Shoe was unwilling to get too ambitious with holiday expectations given uncertainty it sees around promotional activity and consumer sentiment.

New York – Barnes & Noble employed cost-cutting measures that shifted net loss to net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2014 even as net sales took a tumble. Net income of $13.2 million compared to a roughly $502 million net loss reported in the second quarter of fiscal 2013.

General Growth Properties has created an interactive sweepstakes series called Reindeer Games to promote shopping centers across its portfolio throughout the holiday shopping season.

Starring in Reindeer Games is every kid’s favorite reindeer Rudolph, “with his nose so bright.” Rudolph will lead Santa’s eight other reindeer through a series of nine three-day sweepstakes running from Nov. 28 through Dec. 24. By the end of the promotion, the series will have given away more than $25,000 in prizes.

Barnes & Noble faces all the same headwinds as other retailers this holiday season, but its challenges are compounded by the fact that it continues to derive the majority of its revenues from declining sales of physical books.

The operator of 673 book stores said it expects holiday same store sales to decline in the high single digits following a 4.9% comp decrease during the second quarter ended October 26.
Total Barnes & Noble sales declined 8% to $1.7 billion with each of the company’s three segments reporting reduced sales.

Armonk, N.Y. – Online sales on Monday, Nov. 26 were up nearly 12% from the equivalent Monday a year earlier. Data from the IBM Digital Analytics Holiday Benchmark shows that mobile traffic accounted for nearly 32% of all online traffic, up 42% compared to the same period last year.   

Reston, Va. -- For the holiday season-to-date (Nov. 1 - 24), $18.9 billion has been spent online using desktop computers, up 14% versus the corresponding days last year, according to comScore. Tuesday, November 19 was the heaviest online spending day of the season to date at $963 million. Two other shopping days – Thursday, Nov. 14 and Sunday, Nov. 24 – have also seen at least $900 million in online retail spending.

Online sales early this week were up nearly 12% from the equivalent Monday a year earlier. Data from the IBM Digital Analytics Holiday Benchmark shows that mobile traffic accounted for nearly 32% of all online traffic, up 42% compared to the same period last year.