The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

BAHAMIAN retailers yesterday said sales are growing steadily in the run-up to Christmas.

Brent Burrows Jr, CBS Bahamas’ manager of e-commerce and online shopping, told Tribune Business that holiday sales have already been strong as they ramp-up to peak demand in the final week prior to Christmas.

“We start to see it get really busy with Christmas being on a Sunday, and Christmas Eve being a Saturday. We expect that to be a huge day, so we’re preparing for that,” he explained. “But I would say probably in another week or so we’ll really start to see things pick up for the last-minute decorations, which we’ll start to put on sale and then also the Christmas gift items.

“So about two weeks before Christmas we do a pretty nice Christmas sale, which is a mix of the Christmas items and the decorations. We really don’t sell live Christmas trees. Our trees are artificial, but all of the Christmas decorations are going really good. We also had Christmas trees as a part of the Black Friday sales as well, and most of them sold out and they still continue to sell pretty well.”

Christmas decorations have been available at CBS since Halloween. “We’ve been steady at it, and people have been coming in and taking advantage of gift ideas and decorations,” Mr Burrows said.

Alannah Van Onselen, owner/operator of Bahama HandPrint, said sales are going “really good” even though the ShopLocal initiative has been discontinued this year due to lack of retailer participation. However, those merchants she is still in contact with have been signalling a better sales period leading up to Christmas Day.

She added: “Everybody is watching their budgets in their own businesses this year. It’s still early in December, but the last week before December 24, which falls on a Saturday, is a great week for shopping. So it’s just kicking off now. We’re just getting going, but we’re hoping for a good positive season. Other than that we’re just hustling along.”