Stung by Worst Holiday Shopping Season in Decades, Retailers Forge Strategic Alliances
Statistics just released by the U.S. Census Bureau show that the 2008 holiday shopping season was among the grimmest ever for retailers. During the critical October - December selling period, overall sales plummeted 7.7 percent below 2008 figures. And to make it all worse, December 2008 represented the sixth consecutive month of declining sales. That's the worst retail slump on record. Yet faced with those stinging setbacks, retailers are doing something new.