International Council of Shopping Center raises holiday forecast

Press Release:

- Weekly sales rise 3.1% over same week last year

NEW YORK, December 14, 2010 – With only a few more weeks left in the 2010 holiday-shopping season consumers finally got into the spirit with the traditional last minute holiday rush beginning to build. Overall, for the week ending December 11, weekly retail sales rose modestly by 0.8 percent, according to the ICSC-Goldman Sachs Weekly Chain Store Sales Index. In addition, retail sales, on a year-over-year basis, also improved and rose by 3.1 percent.

“Sales rose both on a year-over-year and on a week-over-week basis as consumers stepped up their holiday gift purchases with the ICSC-Goldman Sachs Consumer Tracking Survey showing that the average holiday-gift completion rate rose from 40.1 percent last week up to 56.6 percent this week,” said Michael Niemira, ICSC director of research and chief economist. “That is a rather impressive increase over the past two weeks, but consumers are still a tad below last year’s pace and noticeably below two-years ago, which suggests a stronger late-buying rush over the next two weeks,” Niemira added.

For December, ICSC Research anticipates the month will post a good performance with a year-over-year comparable-store sales growth increase of between 3.0 to 3.5 percent, industry-wide. Given the strong November performance and promising trends in early December, ICSC is revising its November-December holiday-season sales forecast upward by 0.5 percentage points to a range of 3.5 to 4.0 percent. Holiday store-sales growth is still expected to be the strongest since at least 2006.