Candles, a key category this year, are available in such holiday scents as bayberry, peppermint and herbal. Snowballs and musicals are high on Holiday gifts lists. Candle sales are flourishing because of the increased use of candles as decoration and the broadening of outlets for the product. Heritage santas are ubiquitous icons which also add to decorative themes for the Christmas season, with a new array of nativities, angels and religious jewellery. A key issue this year is where Americans will choose to buy their gifts.
Sales seem to be shifting out of specialty retail.
Department stores are showing slight increases so far this year, but mass merchants as a whole experienced depressed sales over 1999, with little evidence to raise hopes in 2000. Internet sales increased last year, but consumer dissatisfaction with delivery arrangements brought the downfall of some cyberspace retailers and put future business in jeopardy for others. Christmas 2000 is expected to be a watershed year for Internet sales and could well spell out which way retailers will be heading in the future. That reflected, for the most part, the drop in revenue from collectible sales and the impact of Internet shopping. Christmas season sales over the Internet in 1999 were impressive, but profits proved to be non-existent or, at best, negligible.