RETAILERS RINGING UP MORE SALES SMALL RISE FROM 2000 POSTED.Byline: Brent Hopkins Staff Writer Though talk abounds of a slowing economy, Los Angeles-area retailers held on for a slight gain over last year's January sales. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. figures released by TeleCheck, a Houston-based check acceptance firm, Los Angeles Los Angeles (lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. retailers showed a slight increase in sales, showing a 1.8 percent gain over January 2000. This lags just a bit behind the national average of 2 percent. According to Bill Ford, TeleCheck's senior economic adviser, this could be the nadir for sales growth. ``If the economy doesn't get much worse, and I don't think it will, then it shouldn't get much lower,'' he said. ``If the Bush administration gets that retroactive Having reference to things that happened in the past, prior to the occurrence of the act in question. A retroactive or retrospective law is one that takes away or impairs vested rights acquired under existing laws, creates new obligations, imposes new duties, or attaches a tax cut they've been talking about, then people will probably get back to shopping.'' Ford suggested a number of factors could account for Los Angeles' relatively sluggish performance, centering mainly on the negative consumer feelings stemming from high energy prices and discussion of a possible recession. Local growth came mainly from an increase in the value of checks written, Ford said. Checks written in January averaged $113.82, up from $111.84 last year. ``You had the same number of people out shopping, but they wrote slightly bigger checks,'' Ford said. ``That's not good news for retailers - they'd rather have more customers and much bigger checks.'' Gains could have also been bolstered by heavy reliance on post-holiday sales, said Richard Giss, a partner with Deloitte and Touche. ``My suspicion is that we came out of the holiday season with excess inventory and it was sold at discount prices,'' he said. ``The real issue is at what price some of those sales were made. We had a lot of inventory to get rid of coming out of the holiday season.'' Not all predictions were so gloomy gloom·y adj. gloom·i·er, gloom·i·est 1. Partially or totally dark, especially dismal and dreary: a damp, gloomy day. 2. , however. Joey Joey after Joseph Grimaldi, famous 19th-century clown. [Am. Hist.: Espy, 45] See : Clowns Char char: see salmon. char Any of several freshwater food and game fishes (genus Salvelinus) of the salmon family, distinguished from the similar trout by light, rather than black, spots; by a boat-shaped, rather than flat, vomer (bone) on the roof of , marketing director for the Northridge Fashion Center Northridge Fashion Center is a large shopping mall located in Northridge, California. It opened in 1971. It was severely damaged during the Northridge Earthquake in 1994, but renovated extensively in 1995 and 1998. , said that with roughly half of stores reporting their January sales, things were looking up. For Fashion Square, sales rose 11 percent in January, he said, buoyed by gift certificate redemptions and gift returns that sparked more purchases. ``It's very interesting in light of the talk about the slowing of the economy,'' Char said. ``The picture's still looking good.'' |
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