EVERETT — The frightful weather isn’t keeping holiday shoppers home curled up in front of a fire.
Schools may be out. And parents are taking time off work. But crowds still are finding their way to area shopping malls with less than a week left until Christmas.
“Up until 8, we were very busy,” said Linda Johannes, general manager of Everett Mall, of Wednesday night shopping.
With another winter storm on the way, people may be taking advantage of any chance they can get to finish up their holiday shopping.
But “this next week is going to be a real challenge,” Johannes said.
With a rough economy and fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas than average, most Americans are behind the curve when it comes to putting presents under the tree this year.
By the second week of December, most consumers were less than half way done with their holiday shopping, the National Retail Federation found in a recent survey. Less than 8 percent of shoppers had completed their purchases. And a whopping 41 million Americans hadn’t even started shopping for holiday gifts, the group found.
Despite the crowds at Everett Mall, Johannes said she thinks many shoppers are waiting for that last drop in prices that sometimes comes the weekend before Christmas. But retailers have discounted deeply already, leaving little margin for further sales, she said.
“I don’t think we’re going to see a huge drop in prices,” Johannes said. “Many retailers already are offering 50 percent off.”
Shoppers are expected to hit discount and department stores in droves this weekend, the National Federation of Retailers reports. And a large majority of last-minute shoppers will skip the crowds and visit the Web, with 40.2 percent of people planning to shop online, up substantially from 34.9 percent last year.
Consumers this year tend to be keeping track of both sales and their finances, using credit cards with less frequency than in years past, the federation found.
“Most Americans have put themselves on a budget this holiday season and are sticking to it,” said Phil Rist, executive vice president for BIGresearch, which does polling for the retail federation.
Still, Everett Mall’s Johannes expects most retailers to have a “decent” holiday season.
“It’s not going to be a barn burner,” she said.
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