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Retail sales get a boost from back-to-school shopping

Posted Sep 6th 2007 10:41AM by Michael Fowlkes (RSS feed)
Filed under: Industry, Consumer Experience, Wal-Mart (WMT), Market Matters, Economic Data, Housing

As retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) and Saks Inc. (NYSE: SKS) start to unveil their August results, it is obvious that back-to-school shopping helped give a needed boost to sales figures after a rather sluggish July. Several of the nation's largest retailers posted strong August numbers this morning.

But not everyone is convinced that this is a sign of things to come. Many analysts are going to overlook August's results as a mere consequence of a back-to-school shopping spree, and will not continue in the months ahead.

A couple of notable retailers (from Melly Alazraki's morning report):

Wal-Mart reported a 3.1% increase in August same-store sales, or 3% including the impact of fuel. Analysts, on average, had expected same-store sales to rise 1.5%. WMT shares are up 2.7% in premarket trading.
Saks reported an 18.2% increase in same-store sales, beating the 9.2% analysts had expected.

Overall, estimates collected by Thomson Financial pegged August same-store sales growth at 2.5%. This is lower than the 3.3% gain during August of last year. If the actual rise does wind up being 2.5%, this will be inline with estimates for the month from the International Council of Shopping Centers.

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