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Retail

Holiday Sales: A Miracle On 34th Street?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Cammonopoly_wideweb__430x3250Santa is for suckers. At least, that is the conventional wisdom

The 2008 holiday season was supposed to be the worst in years, or, perhaps decades. Analysts have forecast retail sales to be down 1% or 2%. Pessimists say those numbers are way off. Even e-commerce, which has grown at double digits for several years, is flat.

It turns out that the first official day of the shopping season may not have been a bust, at least when put against expectations.

According to Reuters, "ShopperTrak, which measures customer traffic, said on Saturday that Black Friday sales rose 3 percent to $10.6 billion." Many of the people who made it to the strip malls and cheesy shopping centers said they were disappointed with the deals. They plan to return in a week or two when merchants are really desperate.

As things stand, the notion that Christmas 2008 would burn to the ground may be premature.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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