Boom Until Christmas

U.S. department-store sales are back in the groove. The Federal Reserve Board last week estimated that in the Sept. 5 week sales in the San Francisco area boomed 49% over last year, Kansas City volume jumped 43%, nationwide sales rose 25%. Total sales in the preceding week were 13% below 1941.

Most of this increase came because Labor Day was six days later this year than last. It was also the combination of more customers and more dollars than storekeepers have seen since spring. Result is that U.S. merchants have ditched their gloomy summertime predictions, now figure on a boom until Christmas, when sales will be the biggest ever. If so, total 1942 sales should easily exceed last year's titanic $5,000,000,000 or more.

Changed Signals. But the new boom is much different from a year ago. It is almost revolutionary. In 1941 the big rush was for high-priced durable goods like radios, washing machines, ironers and refrigerators. Chief soft lines in good demand were silk stockings and woolens. Now almost everybody wants nondurable goods--dresses, cloth coats, shoes, hats and underwear. Other quick sellers: books, liquor, kitchenware, luxury lines like art work, antiques, silverware.

To meet the rush, most merchants are well stocked up. Inventories of New York City department stores at July's end were 82% above last year and the biggest for any July in history. Total U.S. inventories were 70% above 1941.

Unfortunately, some storekeepers bought too much of the wrong things. Expecting a wartime marriage spurt, they stocked heavily on furniture, later discovered that only one bride in three is buying her furniture now. But babies come just the same. So the demand for carriages, strollers, bassinets, etc., is terrific--the supply small. On the other side of the store, row after row of radios and refrigerators are a drug on the market, partly because consumers bought so many of them last year. (July refrigerator sales in New York City stores plummeted 88% below last year.)

Changed Hours. Meanwhile the stores jam through one operation change after another. To take care of war workers and extra-busy housewives, most stores stay open until 9 or 10 one or two nights a week. To offset the transportation pinch a Sears, Roebuck outlet in Sacramento started a free bus service--a sales-getting scheme used for years in outlying Brooklyn districts. And counter revolutions go on endlessly: jams & jellies on the toilet-goods counter; dinnerware in the outlawed electrical-goods department; blackout accessories on the once-busy hosiery counter.

Biggest--and still unsolved--problem is labor. Many department-store clerks are young, low-paid and itching to get into war work (or are playing hide & seek with the draft board). Complained one Manhattan storekeeper: "We are using every means to secure additional help, but with little success. . . . It is like getting stabbed in the back to watch business walk out the door simply because it is not possible to get sufficient salespeople."

Even so, department storekeepers are far better off than the huge mail-order houses. Because so much mail-order business was in now verboten durable goods, sales flopped 23% in August, are down 6% for the year to date. At this rate, department stores this year will turn in a better sales record than the mail-order houses for the first time in eleven years. Despite their wartime troubles, storekeepers can smile over that.

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