THE WORST WINTER SALES FOR A DECADE

Palma.—The Winter sales officially ended on Match 7, two months after they started on January 6, but the conclusions are not encouraging.
The Small to Medium Sized Retail Association, PIMECO, said yesterday that, overall, trading and takings were three percent down on last year and slammed this year's Winter sales as “one of the worst for the past decade.” According to PIMECO, nearly half of Majorca's small traders, 46 percent, takings were down.
Ten percent have been able to claim that trading was up on last year while the remaining 44 percent said that takings were pretty much the same.
PIMECO members have attributed the poor response to the sales to two main factors.
The first being the recession and weak consumer confidence and secondly, the lack of potential customers.
Cold snap
As the key retail associations have already said, the first two to three days of the sales were very exciting and encouraging, but trading then gradually tailed off and, had it not been for last month's Siberian cold snap, which sent demand for winter clothes surging, the end results could well have been disastrous for the retail sector.