U.S. retailers can’t wait for back-to-school
Notebooks, lunch boxes, clothing and computers draw shoppers into stores
The $84-billion (U.S.) back-to-school shopping season is back just in time as far as beleaguered mall merchants in the U.S. are concerned.
Consumer spending on kids and young adults returning to the classroom not only is the second-largest shopping period behind the winter holidays, but it’s one when many conventional physical stores are holding their own against the surge of online competition. Although the growth of e-commerce has forced dozens of U.S. retail chains to close thousands of locations at malls and elsewhere, analysts said that children and their parents still like visiting stores to purchase items on their back-toschool lists — notebooks and lunch boxes and clothes and computers.
“This is one category where we’re seeing a surprising level of support for the in-store experience,” said Jim Mills, who heads the Southern California consumer business practice for Deloitte, the consulting and auditing firm.
Back-to-school shoppers plan to do most of their buying in physical stores, according to a survey conducted for the National Retail Federation (NRF) by Prosper Insights & Analytics.
Online shopping came in third, tied with clothing stores, when consumers were asked to name all the places they were planning to do their buying. Nearly 46 per cent of those surveyed said they would do some online shopping, almost unchanged from a year ago but up about 10 percentage points from 2015, showing the strong growth of e-commerce.
Retailers increasingly are making it easier for consumers to order products online and then have them delivered to their homes or pick them up at the store. The latter option often prompts shoppers to stroll elsewhere in the store to buy other merchandise or — in the case of WalMart Stores and Target, for instance — pick up groceries as well.
For many youngsters and their parents, the store visits are as important as the convenience of e-commerce. It’s one thing for kids to give their parents a holiday wish list and hope for the best, and quite another for kids to demand a select type of notebook, backpack or apparel after they’ve looked them over in person, analysts said.
In contrast to back-to-school shop- ping, the winter holidays find parents often prefer to shop without their children. The NRF’s 2016 holiday shopping survey reflected that, with online shopping outpacing every other store category: About 52 per cent of shoppers planned to buy online; the No. 2 category was department stores at 42 per cent.
Back-to-school sales, including those for young adults returning to college, are expected to climb a stout 10.3 per cent this year to $83.6 billion from $75.8 billion, the NRF estimates, citing stronger employment, higher consumer confidence about the economy and lower gasoline prices.
The Conference Board, a business trade group, last week said its consumer confidence index rose in July to its highest level since mid-2001.