SAN FRANCISCO: In a rare bright spot for the U.S. retail industry, e-commerce sites had a strong Thanksgiving weekend, with online sales from Friday through Monday up 13 percent, compared with sales in the same period last year, according to data by comScore.I'm still not convinced that main street America is hurting all that much. The housing foreclosures seem to be coagulated (for the most part) in the urban areas. And, then there is this:
The Monday after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday was the second-heaviest online spending day on record, comScore said, behind only Dec. 10, 2007.
Online sales climbed to $846 million, up 15 percent from the previous year.
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Yeah...yeah...I'm not gullible enough to think that the sales of one weekend indicate a trend. The question is whether holiday sales will be sustainable. On that same note (and this is anecdotal)...but I still see full parking lots at the local retail locations, restaurants have lines of folks waiting to be seated...and traffic in and around the usual mall haunts (New York, New Jersey, and Philadelpia)is frustratingly busy.
My personal opinion is that the true hurt will arrive in about a year as the new cadre of "change" artists reflect their philosophy by moving the decimal point to the right on your "voluntary" contribution to the Federal/ State/ Local government so that ineptly run businesses and mathematically challenged home "owners" can continue to bask in their idiocy.
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