A CHEAPER TRICK

Discounts didn’t help retail sales

Frugal New Yorkers, meet deeply discounted merchandise.

That was the story for back-toschool 2016 — a match that, while not exactly made in retail heaven, helped local stores move more merchandise than last year.

But because of steep price cuts, a 3.2 percent bump in transactions didn’t result in overall sales growth compared with last year.

In fact, sales at stores across New York state slid 0.2 percent from 2015 levels, despite the easy comparisons against disastrously weak results last year, according to payments processing firm First Data.

“The number of swipes grew at a robust rate — it’s just that people are shopping more for discounted goods compared to a year ago,” said Rishi Chhabra, First Data vice president of information and analytics.

New Yorkers had bargains galore to choose from as stores, including Walmart and Target, relentlessly hyped deep discounts and rolled out new technology to encourage shopping in-store, online on home computers or on mobile devices.

While unemployment has declined since the Great Recession, many New Yorkers are still scraping by with too little income.

Perhaps that’s why used clothing stores were the big winner in New York in July and August, with a 7.7 percent sales gain.

Other standouts were cosmetic retailers, up 7.3 percent, and sports apparel stores, with a 6.6 percent gain. Losers included men’s clothing stores, down 6 percent, and shoe stores, with a 5.9 percent drop, First Data said. Nationwide, back-to-school sales grew 1.1 percent.

Continuing to corral market share from brick-and-mortar stores, e-commerce sales climbed 10 percent.

However, even e-commerce logged a slower growth rate than last year, while the Commerce Department’s core retail sales for August failed to meet economists’ expectations of a slight gain, instead slipping 0.1 percent from July.

Ahead of the all-important holiday selling season, savvy local retailers are letting customers choose from an ever-widening array of online and in-store shopping and shipping combinations — while trying to reestablish a trip through the brick-and-mortar doors as a fun alternative to that omnipresent mobile phone screen.

Downtown children’s clothing and furniture chain Babesta logged modest back-to-school sales gains, but revenue jumped sharply during a recent “wine and juice boxes” event, complete with black-and-white cookies echoing the palette of gender-neutral clothing collection Nununu.

“Retailers have to step up their game and deliver something exceptional,” said owner Jennifer Cattaui.