Retailers Should Have Good Holiday Season

Retailers are feeling better about business. More important, they're doing better as well.

With consumer spending accounting for roughly two thirds of U.S. economic activity, growing consumer confidence backed up by actual spending bodes well for the all important upcoming holiday selling season.

Sun Still Shines on Retailers is good news worth sharing:

"It is too soon to know how superstorm Sandy might affect consumer spending. But up until the storm hit, stores were doing well. And the body language from retailers suggests they expect the good times to continue.

The October sales reports that many retailers released Thursday were for the most part strong. Same-store sales, excluding drugstores, were up 5% from a year earlier, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. . . .

Because those October sales covered the four-week period that ended before Sandy hit Monday night, they say nothing about how the storm might have damped sales—and may in some cases have actually been boosted by people laying in supplies.

But also on Thursday, car companies reported October sales that covered the whole month and were a little lighter than analysts expected. This suggests that the storm kept customers off dealership lots last weekend.

Many retailers have by now likely seen the same sort of disruption to demand show up in their stores. So it was notable that they didn't say anything too downbeat on Thursday to temper investors' bullishness on their shares as the holiday shopping season approaches.

One reading of all this is that results in the sector's fiscal third-quarter—which for most retailers ended Wednesday and which they will begin reporting next week—should be pretty good. The other is that stores are feeling confident that the recent pickup in consumer spending has strong-enough legs for them to meet holiday sales targets, despite the superstorm."

SUMMING UP

A boom it's not. That's for sure.

However, neither is it a bust. That's for sure, too.

Things are getting better, and that's a sign of more good things to come --- and for many more years to come, too.

At least that's my take.

Thanks. Bob.