News

ICSC forecasts holiday chain store sales to increase by 3 percent

September 26, 2012

With the holiday season right around the corner, the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) is forecasting a 3.0 percent sales increase for the traditional November-December holiday period. Additionally, ICSC anticipates that the other two measures of U.S. industry holiday sales — shopping-center sales and "GAFO-store" sales — will increase slightly as well.

However, this year's season comes with a bit more uncertainty than usual because of the increased crosscurrents — a softening in the economy, improving housing prices and markets, rising gasoline prices, a presidential election and the infamous looming $500 billion in automatic spending cuts to the federal budget and tax increases slated for January 1, 2013.

This of course begs the question: will the Christmas holiday shopping season be held hostage to Congress' deliberations on the automatic federal spending cuts and tax increases? Michael P. Niemira, vice president of research and chief economist for ICSC, says the potential for this to happen is there, however, "despite the cautiousness displayed in our forecast for the 2012 holiday season due to the uncertainty about the automatic spending cuts, Congress has a real opportunity to resolve the issue quickly and amicably to assuage consumer fears, which, in turn, could propel this season's performance far above ICSC's current expectations."

Additionally, holiday hiring is highly correlated with holiday spending and it appears that overall, retailers will add over 26 thousand seasonal jobs this year, which would be a modest increase over 2011.