While children head to streets, adults head to stores for after-Christmas shopping
Published 12:00 am Tuesday, January 2, 2007
The holiday shopping season continues this week as people venture out to return gifts, cash in gift cards and look for after-Christmas bargains.
A number of business in the area reported high traffic the day after Christmas as consumers ventured out to check out the after-Christmas market. Many said that the day after Christmas is an important day for their business, though it isn’t quite the buying bonanza that occurs prior to the holiday.
Rich said that people want to use their holiday gift cards and spend some of the money that they get for Christmas. She said that the day after Christmas has always been a traditionally busy day.
Other businesses say that their after Christmas sales are what drive the consumers out of their homes and into the shops the day after the holiday. They say that gift cards and returns don’t play a huge part in the initial shoppers after the holidays.
Brown said that the after Christmas sales are a way for vendors to get rid of excessive inventory. Many stores try to get ride of their inventory towards the end of the year before their shipments for the next year begin trickling in.&8221;
While many vendors report good crowds the day after Christmas, others feel that the shopping drops off and returns to a more normal pace. For some stores the Christmas season didn’t have the push that they were expecting for the holidays.
Bond said that the store didn’t make the sales that it had projected for the holiday, and that the projection wasn’t as high as it was last year. She said that she thought people didn’t spend as much this year because of high-energy prices and that the economy wasn’t as good as last year.
Adams said that that sales the day after Christmas, however, were pretty normal. She said that it was just like another normal day before the holidays.
Adams said that while the sales the day before Christmas were good the store still didn’t meet the goal for sales that it had set for the holidays. She said that the store did, however, do more sales than the other Peebles stores in the region.
