Successful shopping season
By ROBERT LINNEHAN
Cherry Hill Sun
12/28/2007

In spite of adverse weather conditions, area retailers happy with the holiday returns

Despite several adverse factors in the holiday season, marketing officials in Cherry Hill said the holiday shopping season was successful for local retailers and malls in the South Jersey area.

Lisa Wolstromer, marketing director for the Cherry Hill Mall, said despite several bad weather days in the month of December, the mall had a very successful holiday season.

An extremely busy shopping week leading up to the Christmas holiday helped the mall and its retailers immensely, Wolstromer said.

“The retailers we’ve spoken to are very happy so far with our holiday shopping season,” she said. “Our new retailers, such as Armani Exchange, Crate and Barrel, The Container Store, they’ve all been happy with the way we’ve performed so far this season.”

As with many malls this season, Wolstromer said gift cards seemed to be the hot item of the year. The Cherry Hill Mall sells mall gift cards that customers can use at shops in the mall, and many of the individual retailers sell their own gift cards as well.

Teenagers, she said, seem to enjoy receiving the gift cards this year as gifts, rather than have their parents pick out a present for them.

“With the increased sale of gift cards, you really see the holiday shopping season extend into January,” she said. “It seemed to be a very popular gift this year, you see a lot of people coming in to buy them as last-minute gifts.”

Despite good foot traffic in the mall and sales that are on par with years past, Wolstromer said that retailers in the mall are reporting that people actually seem to be spending less this year.

The lack of the one must-have gift – such as the Tickle Me Elmo Doll a few years ago – and other factors seem to be affecting the amount of money people are spending this season, Wolstromer said.

“What you’re seeing is people are cutting back on the amount of dollars they’re spending this year,” she said. “People are still shopping of course, but because of concerns with what’s happening in the economy, fuel prices, the housing market conditions, you see them cutting back on the amount of money they spend.”

Many consumers also seem to be waiting until after the holiday season to start spending the majority of their money, at a time when department stores typically run sales, Wolstromer said.

Like the Cherry Hill Mall, the Moorestown Mall also has reported a lower number of sales and customers this holiday season. Lori Anzivino, marketing director of the mall, said the bad-weather days seemed to keep people from frequenting the mall as much as years past.

“But we have had a consistent flow of customers, and we saw a huge business pick-up the week leading into Christmas,” she said. “The majority of our tenants are breaking even or are up in sales, so everyone seems to be happy with the season so far.”

Unlike the Cherry Hill Mall or The Promenade at Sagemore in Marlton, Anzivino said the mall’s gift card and sales of gift cards in general are down by about 3 percent this year.

However, shoppers seemed to be spending about as much this year as they have in the past for gifts.

The Moorestown Mall has made up for the decrease in shoppers, she said, by instituting some new programs this year that have created additional revenues.

The most surprising of which, she said, was a new way for people to enjoy meeting Santa.

“Our Santa photo sales are up over last year. We introduced three days this season where people could actually bring in their pets to have their pictures with Santa,” she said. “The interesting photo opportunities were held before or after mall hours so it didn’t interfere with the children visiting Santa. Many people wanted to have their pet’s photo taken with Santa. It was a great success.”

Anzivino did say that several ecological products were selling well this season. Macy’s, she said, in particular was seeing success with its green cosmetic line. The green trend could be one that continues well into the next year, she said.