Bill Dreher Holiday Quotations

I think it all comes down to Wal-Mart's aggressive advertising campaign. They are being much louder with their campaign, and I think they've done a good job of stealing the 'early-bird' holiday shoppers.

I think it all comes down to Wal-Mart's aggressive advertising campaign, ... They are being much louder with their campaign, and I think they've done a good job of stealing the 'early-bird' holiday shoppers.

The announcement by Neiman Marcus...makes us as concerned as we have ever been that this Christmas will be extremely lackluster. It appears now the high-end consumer is beginning to scale back their purchases, which does not bode well for the holiday season. This type of thing is clearly going to have an impact on other high-end retailers.

Wal-Mart has made it very clear that the prospects for this holiday are much stronger than the conventional wisdom would have had it.

We're not out of the woods yet. Forty percent of holiday sales are wrapped up in the week before Christmas.

Consumers were not in the holiday spirit up until the last week of the holiday season, when there was a mad rush for the store. And the big unknown is the result of that game of chicken, where shoppers waited until the last minute to get the best bargains and retailers held off.

They are admitting they have very cloudy visibility on the very critical holiday season. What might be more significant to investors is that even though they had an admittedly superb second quarter, where are we going from here?

The same issues which are depressing the consumer confidence numbers are going to depress holiday sales, ... Christmas is going to show up this year as it shows up every year. The question is, how generous are people going to be? Are they going to go whole hog and return to the decadent spending levels of three or four years ago? No, clearly not. People are going to be buying toys, but how many presents they buy, how wide that circle of gift giving is really is in question.

The shopper appears to be in mid-season form with the holiday season just having started.

The news we got today was incrementally negative, even for the best operators out there. And clearly this does not bode well for a strong holiday season.