Holiday report: E-commerce dips, electronics plummet

Over the next few days, a picture of holiday sales will begin to materialize.

One of the first reports to surface doesn't sound incredibly painful until specific categories--like electronics--are broken out. And then the hurt becomes obvious.

MasterCard Advisors, a unit of the credit card giant, released on Friday its SpendingPulse analysis of national retail and service sales for the holiday-shopping season.

Overall retail sales year over year (excluding gasoline, which doesn't make a great holiday gift anyway) were down 2 percent in November and down 4 percent from December 1 to 24.

Overall, e-commerce fared relatively well from November 1 to December 24. It was down just 2.3 percent, reflecting the overall national trend. That seems to be in line with Amazon.com's positive report of its own sales.

The electronics and appliance category, however, showed a 26 percent decline over 2007. This category will become more interesting when sales figures for specific types of electronics become available.

So-called luxury sales, including jewelry, were down more than 34 percent year over year. Clothing sales were down about 20 percent.

Michael McNamara, a SpendingPulse vice president, didn't mince words. "A difficult economic environment combined with unfavorable weather during the last week of shopping made 2008 one of the most challenging holiday shopping seasons in decades," he said in a statement.

[asefati]

as a retail business owner that also sell online (<a href="http://www.soccernation.com" rel="followmeplease">SoccerNation.com</a> I saw a huge difference between this years sales compare to previous years. Not only there were less sales, but also people were buying things that were cheaper or were on clearance. And everyone was trying negotiate price and lower the prices and to meet our numbers we went along.

However, I think it is just matter of time where people see the result of this. Less Sales means less business which means less money and less profit, therefore means less jobs!!!
Yes, I am not going to hire anyone in 2009 and I am cutting down the hours for my only two employees.
I am cutting costs, and buying less, so my vendors are also going to feel the pain because of my cut downs and perhaps they are going to start laying people off! So you will see that this clearance prices and low sales will end up hurting the consumers because one way of another they are influenced by it as many will lose their jobs and employers wont hire as many next year.

Suggestion to Obama: Start taking the money back from Wallstreet and pay it as tax incentive and bonus to mainstreet. The bailout was the biggest scam ever and was there only to protect the super rich which make up less than .001% of this country!

[rstinnett]

Hold on, I don't understand something here. You say that cheap prices will hurt workers (and all of us) in the end. Let me state I agree with this.

Yet, Wal-Mart has made this their corporate motto. They brag about it and yet people just keep on going there.

I put a lot of the blame soley at the feet of Wal-Mart and the people who shop there. Wal-Mart could care less how many employees it puts out of work shipping jobs to China. They will bankrupt a company to squeeze a nickel out of it. They will work their employees off the clock without pay. They have no shame and act like they are doing us a favor.

For years people warned us what was going to happen in this "Wal-Mart Society" and people just kept right on shopping there. Now what MANY people foretold is coming true, THOSE people are losing their jobs because guess what -- that factory worker whose job got shipped to China so you could get your lightbulb for a nickel cheaper, well he is out of work, so he can't spend money at the hardware store, or eat at the restaurant downtown. So the restaurant is out of business, so they aren't placing orders for food from the warehouse that employers the workers who shopped at YOUR business.

So enjoy your Wal-Mart junk while you can. America finally did it -- they sold their soul (and economic freedom) for a Chinese made Pez dispenser.

[BeamerMT]

rstinnett: Oh yes lets blame walmart for all our troubles, because they are the ONLY retail outlet that gets most of its merchandise from China or anywhere else besides the US (not!)! The ONLY reason why people blame walmart for everything is because its one of the biggest retailers out there and thus presents a huge target for people to vent their frustrations on. Go look at Target, or Shopko, or Sears or anywhere else and tell me they buy mostly from the US! I have and they don't. If 'Made in America' is something we want to bring back, then we need to tell the retailers, ALL OF THEM, that we are willing to pay EXTRA for that privilege. Either that or we as Americans need to find something else to become good at and 'sell' that to the world. As for the people who shop there, walmart targets the poor and middle class families who cannot afford 30 dollars for a t-shirt and 1000 dollars for a TV set. They found a niche and made it work, so well in fact that people, like myself, can afford to get things, some of which were considered luxury items a few years ago! Why pay 30 dollars for a t-shirt when you can get it for 10 or less at walmart? Same shirt, different label, made in the SAME part of the world.

[Dalkorian]

Bravo BeamerMT. Nice job building a BS case against one argument Rstinnett brought up (shipping jobs to China), ignoring all the rest and figuring you've done your job defending prostitute-mart. That's right, I *KNOW* that $30 shirt for $10 story is bull. But for the moment let's say it's true. You've ignored what they have done to local businesses (bankrupted for a nickel of profit) and you've ignored what they have done to their employees (working 45 hours a week, but only 35 of it on the clock so they don't get any benefits because they're part time - any complaints and they are only scheduled for 10 hours next week).

So let's fast forward a few years into the future. Your child is trying to score his/her first summer job and lands one. Now the child is suffering from falling grades because all their study time is taken up by their new job, but they're still broke all the time because you discover though they are working 38 hours a week they're only getting paid for 25 of them. How important was that $20 savings on that shirt now? So you tell them to look for another job, but what you don't realize is the only jobs available are doing the same things as prostitute-mart in order to compete with them. Your child's hours are cut back to 10 hours a week (paid that is, they're still expected to work 25 hours though) in retaliation for mentioning the falling grades to their manager and if they have a problem with that they are cut back again next week if not outright fired for "poor job performance".

It's idiots like you who can't think beyond next weeks desperate housewives episode that have brought our nation near ruin.

[Jim1900]

asefati,

Why do we need Wall Street at all? With online trading, why not just bypass them? They serve only to cook up misleading investing schemes that serve no useful economic purpose. And they are able to do that only because they can convince the government to bail them out when their bad practices are exposed, or can pass their bad portfolios on to legitimate banks where the taxpayers are stuck for the losses through insurance that was intended for sound lending practices.

Why not just get rid of Wall Street entirely?

[kudos2uguys]

First you have to look at who came out with this report, Mastercard now all my friends and relatives including me, did something this Christmas that we have not done in years, we did not use our credit cards to purchase ANYTHING. Cash only! So if they are tracking sales by credit card use, their facts are going to be way off. Credit card companies in the past few months have been jacking up interest rates, lowering credit limits on people who have fantastic credit scores and pay on time and they are doing it just because they can, we aren't stupid, why in the world would I continue to use a credit card that was jacked from 9.9% to 18% when the banks themselves are paying near zero percent to borrow from other banks, not to mention the bail out money given to these same banks only to jack rates. While I have not terminated my credit card accounts, I have taken all of them except for one and cut them in half so I don't use them. I just want the cc companies to know, we the American public know what you are doing and we are taking action with non action and that being, not using their cards!

[hikeeveryday]

Electronics are bound to be down because there was no new gizmo this year, like last year...and the year before....and the year before..... and the year before..... Plus, TV prices dropped like crazy. And the netbook craze has sucked some of the price and margin out of the computer business.

There is bound to come a saturation point where people just don't need anything new. In my household we have two computers, five stereos, TV, GPS, iPods, Wii, PSP, PS2 (although not PS3), four digital cameras, two camcorders and three cellphones. How many more electronics do we need?

[byl01]

An excellent point about saturation. Once you get an MP3 player that covers 20 Hz-20 kHz (which you could buy 2-3 years ago at clearance price), you need to grow a new and improved set of ears to justify a new player.

[noam sayne]

Because of the timing of my move to a new apartment Nov 1, and having a lot of things to buy, I did my purchasing in November and early December. My monitor was an old 17" CRT, and I had no TV or bed. In six weeks I spent over $1000 on a 24" LCD monitor, a 19" widescreen LCD TV and a new mattress. It was all cash and will continue to be that way.

My actual Christmas spending consisted of Wii Mario Cart for my son on Christmas Eve, and some new (cheap) cookware for me on Boxing Day ;-) I have all the electronics I need for now, except for a Bluray player, but they will have to come down a bit more, as it is a low priority item.

[mych01]

We have to start to distinguish between wealth and things that we will eventually trash..
Our US economy has long been derailed since the first out sourced idea.. US lost manufacturing and services to lower producer countries... cheaper
And what did we ending up exporting in a big way? Debt, the sub prime type.. no wealth creation here.
We do need to smart up the fact that at one point of time, we need to have those jobs back and start to buy Made in America.. when will that be? my guess is that the mighty Dollar will need to take a great fall to make those activities viable.

[GlennW007]

Kabee Toys, kaput. Linens N Things, kaput & gone. CompUSA, kaput,gone,closed.
What keeps Circuit City in business? They did a bad job moving the old merchandise to the closing stores, then charge Full Price for the junk. The other stores looked like a Rummage Sale to me.
Between Office Depot, Office Max, Staples, it appears Office Depot is the weakest of the 3. They will be next.
I'm not surprised these overpriced retailers are going under. I had this one figured when everybody in the mall was trying to sell the same brand of jeans. Who has the time to shop 2-3 or more stores, for the same item, at the same price??