Holiday Shopping Season, Retailer | featured news

Amazon's Kindle Fire is a Catch-22 for retailers: The $199 tablet computer could both help Christmas traffic and hurt future sales.

It looks like retailers will have to work extra hard to keep this holiday season from turning into a bah humbug. A new forecast indicates that sales will likely not be as high as last year and that shoppers won't be hitting the stores as much.

Big chains report an 8.9% increase from a year earlier, led by discounters and apparel stores. A later Easter is considered only partly responsible for the big jump.

Retailers are reporting solid revenue gains for February, extending the strong spending momentum seen during the holiday season. Worries are growing, however, that rising gas prices...

Zale, Tiffany book revenue gains over key shopping season.

Though December was weaker than expected, the overall holiday season was still relatively strong, analysts said.

A blizzard in the Northeast this weekend postponed about $1 billion in holiday retail sales by keeping shoppers out of stores in the days after Christmas, research firm ShopperTrak said on Wednesday.

Snowstorms have deterred shoppers at after Christmas sales in America's northeast, while retailers in the rest of the country are anticipating the highest sales in three years.

Holiday online retail spending for the 47 days of the shopping season through December 17 totaled $27.46 billion, according to new data from ComScore, up 12% from the comparable period a year ago. Sales in the latest week were $5.15 billion, up 14% from the comparable week last year.