Early Christmas Bells

Christmas is still some 70 shopping days away, but the nation's retailers already have visions of new records dancing in their heads. Judging by the strength of autumn sales, they expect a 6% to 8% rise in Christmas sales, a jump that would easily round off 1965 as the buyingest year in history. Breaking sales records has become practically a Christmas tradition of recent years, and merchants would be disappointed indeed if rising population and prices together did not cause the phenomenon to occur again. What is unusual about their optimism is that this year it is so early, so unanimous and so genuine.

"Sales have been running ahead of 1964 all year," says Otto Eckstein of the Council of Economic Advisers. "It has been the same story virtually every month." August actually ran at a 5.6% gain, well below the 9% gain of January and February and the 8% gain of July--but merchants feel relieved that the advances have continued. Across the U.S., one big department store after another is reporting sales gains over last year: up 15% for Atlanta's Rich's, 18% for San Francisco's Gump's, 6% for Dallas' Neiman-Marcus, and 5% for New York's Gimbels (despite the newspaper strike). Even more significant than the figures is the attitude of shoppers. "Figures aren't our guiding light," says President Bernard Sakowitz of Houston's Sakowitz Inc. "We go more by the climate of the people, and that's good."

What are they buying? Cars, of course, and all the usual retail goods. But the U.S. consumer seems to keep finding new outlets for his buying urge: he has boosted the sales of electric guitars and banjos as part of the folk-rock trend, lifted the men's cosmetics industry to a $35 million business in recent years, is buying more jewelry than ever. He looks less at the price tag nowadays than at quality, fashion, style, color. The biggest new main-line item is the color-TV set. Stores are selling all they can get--and in some cases letting go sets that they were saving for Christmas. RCA's David Sarnoff last week predicted that sales this year will hit 2,500,000. The TV-set and TV-tube makers cannot turn out sets fast enough to keep up with demand.

So far, the buyer has not gone wild. But to top off an extraordinary year--one in which the economy confounded all the skeptics by continuing to soar--few economists or merchants would really mind if the consumer let himself go a bit. That may well happen; year after year people have been spending more on Christmas gifts, and this Christmas the excise-tax cut is apt to increase the volume of luxury buying.

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