Tuesday is a Slow Day for Retail Sales

Tuesday is not the best day of the week for retail. Salesmen at the Dillard’s Department Store in Fayetteville’s Northwest Arkansas Mall sold only two suits on Tuesday, Oct. 15. But if it had been a Saturday, they say, it would be a different story.

“It was a rather slow Tuesday,” Joe Sweetser, manager of the men’s suits department at Dillard’s, said referring to Oct. 15. “Saturday is certainly the peak day of the week. About 40 percent of the week [in sales] is done on Saturday. Almost half of the weekly sales are done on Saturday.”

Elsewhere in the mall, the Houndstooth Clothing Co. kiosk was faring a little better. Michael Baker, founder of the company, said he sold 34 T-shirts that day at his two Fayetteville locations.

Certainly, a $15 T-shirt is an easier impulse buy than a $400 suit. But Baker is quick to note that his sales are better on Saturdays also.

A total of 9,851 people entered the mall in Fayetteville on Oct. 15. The mall managers monitor such things via cameras at each entrance.

Andrea Taylor, marketing manager for the mall, said the number of people who walked into the mall would have been closer to 25,000 on any given Saturday in October.

But October is a particularly slow month for retail, she said. Parents are finished with back-to-school shopping, and it’s too early to be thinking about Christmas. It’s sort of that lull time of year when nothing is on sale.

Cold weather, however, helped retailers buck the slow October trend as consumers began shopping for coats and sweaters.

“We had three days in a row of frost,” said Dean Redford, who is manager of the J.C. Penney department store in the mall.

“We had lows of 27, 32 and 30 on the 14th, 15th and 16th. … It was so easy to sell a coat, it was like taking candy from a baby. I tell you what, this October has turned me into an optimist.”

Despite the downtrend in the economy, October was a discounter’s delight.

For the four weeks ending Nov. 1, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. reported sales of $18.497 billion, an increase of 11.3 percent over the $16.616 billion in the similar period of 2001. That boils down to $659,964,285 per day for all of Wal-Mart’s 3,341 U.S. stores and 1,227 international stores combined.

The world’s largest company doesn’t break sales down by the day or week or for individual stores or regions.