By Lisa Baertlein and Jessica Wohl
LOS ANGELES/CHICAGO (Reuters) - Retailers are counting on time-crunched shoppers to swarm stores on "Super Saturday," but a heavy winter storm threatened to strand them at home on the final weekend before Christmas.
A snowstorm blanketed the U.S. East Coast early on Saturday, with storm warnings in effect from North Carolina in the south to southern New England. The National Weather Service warned of "extremely treacherous" travel conditions throughout the region.
"The one thing a retailer doesn't want is a major snowstorm on the Saturday before Christmas," said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at the NPD Group. "This is definitely not the Christmas gift any retailer would ever ask for."
"It was kind of eerie the Friday night before Christmas to see some of the retail malls not as busy as they should have been," he added about the sporadic shopper traffic he saw at stores on the East Coast.
Cohen said if the weather clears up many consumers may simply shift their shopping to Sunday, but retailers will nonetheless feel an impact where the weather was bad.
Severe weather could derail sales on Saturday at retailers with a large presence in cities from New York to Washington D.C., including Bon-Ton Stores
Even before the storm, nobody was predicting a blow-out year for holiday sales as consumers are still under pressure from a double-digit unemployment rate and a weak economy.
Retailers have worked to avoid a repeat of last year, when a global economic meltdown left them buried in excess merchandise and desperate to make a sale at almost any price.
Holiday sales forecasts have narrowed over the course of the shopping season to a range of down 1 percent to up 1 percent from 2008, when sales fell for the first time since the National Retail Federation started tracking the data.
"We believe retail sales will likely suffer as the sales lost during what historically has been the busiest weekend of the year will not be recovered. You can't make up for lost days!" Stifel Nicolaus analyst Richard Jaffe said in a Friday note.
Jaffe and others said storms could drive consumers to shop online. While that could be a boon for sites such as Amazon.com
On Friday afternoon, Gap Inc
Those still trying to finish their shopping appear to be waiting for steeper discounts.
"There's always going to be a step up in the promotions in the days before the holiday, and there's going to be some clearance after the holiday," said Cowen & Co analyst Laura Champine. "I do think it will be less promotional ... it's a really gradual training of the customer to buy closer to full price."
Consumers surveyed in late November by Consumer Edge Research said they planned to spend an average of $402 on gifts this season. That was down from the $440 those polled in October said they were planning for. (Reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles, Phil Wahba and Nicole Maestri in New York and Jessica Wohl and Ben Klayman in Chicago, editing by Anthony Boadle)
