Local merchants defy national trend

Despite reports of retail gloom and doom on a national level, local merchants seem to have bucked the trend when it comes to reports of poor spending.

Of course, a drop in holiday sales across the board would have been no surprise this year, given the state of the economy, but some local stores say they are more than happy with the numbers they have seen.

Bob Davis, who is manager of JC Penney’s men’s department, said things went better than expected when it came to holiday sales at the Corbin location.

“It went real good at this store,” Davis said. “We did better than a lot of places, so that’s something to be thankful for.”

Davis said the spending didn’t stop with the passing of the Christmas holiday either, but the store was the beneficiary of a post Christmas push in the advertising department.

“After Christmas we did really well also,” Davis said. “We had a pretty good ad campaign to help push sales and I think that played a big role.”

Another large retailer in Corbin’s Trademart Center, Belk’s, also had reports of a positive holiday season, but Corbin store manager, Cathy Jones, said that the results locally may have been an exception to the rule.

“The day after Thanksgiving was not good to us at all, which kind of gave a bad outlook for the season,” Jones said. “It really hit hard the last three days before Christmas for us.

“The days after Christmas have been very good for us as well,” she added. “So, despite all the bad news on the national media, it wasn’t all that bad for us and I think Belk’s is in great shape compared to other retailers.”
How good is Belk’s looking? Jones said the proof may be a few miles north on Interstate 75.

“We are getting ready to open a new store in Richmond, so things could be a lot worse,” she said. “As for our store, like I said we did well and compared to other stores in our division, we fared better than the rest.”

Not to be outdone, another local retailer was in the minority when compared nationally, based on the sale of luxury items. According to U.S. News, sales of luxury items, however, took the worst beating this year with a whopping 34 percent decline.
However, Creative Touch Jewelers had a solid December and co-owner Theresa Carpenter said she is pleased with the way things went and said the week leading up to Christmas was as busy as usual.

“I am very thankful for what we have done,” Carpenter said. “We had a pretty good season and stayed busy. It was down from last year, but I feel like we did well.

“Our busiest week is always the week before the holiday,” she said. “Christmas Eve is usually our busiest day of the year, but is wasn’t this year because it was so steady leading up to it. I think what really helps us is that we do so much repair work and we have people constantly dropping things off and picking them up leading up to Christmas.
“It may not have been the best year ever, but like I said, we are very thankful to have done as well as we did and we are still here, so that’s always good.”