Retail Activity Anecdotes Suggest Slightly Lighter Sales

Over the weekend I visited various New York City retail locations. I went into about 10 different stores. I spoke with floor sales personnel in each location. From what I gathered, the foot traffic was on the light side and those customers that were coming into the stores were sticking to the heavily discounted bargains. A few retail locations I walked into had no customers at all and these were in high volume foot trafficked areas. Some of the stores with low traffic were not offering much in the way of discounts. The electronics stores with large discounts seemed to be generating the highest foot traffic. But from my perspective, the customer traffic seemed low even in the normally busy streets of Manhattan. Not sure if this is a New York phenomenon or activity in other parts of the country was similar. Not always easy to decipher trends.