Sales Pick Up Ahead of Holidays
By Kim Yoo-chul
Staff Reporter
With consumer sentiment improving ahead of the Chuseok holiday, gift sales at big and small retailers are expected to post a record high.
Big retailers project sales to soar 20 percent on average from last year’s holidays and even 40 percent from the Lunar New Year holiday.
Sales at traditional markets, which have been in the doldrums, are also poised to pick up on the back of signs of economic recovery.
``As of Sept. 20, gift sales for Chuseok jumped 21 percent from a year ago,’’ said an official from the Lotte Department Store, South Korea’s largest department store chain.
The official said sales of wine and beef gift-sets rose 85 percent and 30 percent, respectively.
An official from GS Mart, the nation’s small retailer chain, said sales of high-priced gift-sets priced between 120,000 won and 150,000 won increased more than 15 percent from last year.
E-Mart, one of the nation’s major discount store chains, also expects its 30,000 won gift-sets for Chuseok to be completely sold out earlier than expected.
To accommodate more food and gift buyers, the Lotte Department Store decided to extend closing hours by half an hour to 8:30 p.m. until Sept. 23 in its 23 outlets nationwide.
Also, Hyundai Department Store, another major retailer, will lengthen operating hours by 30 minutes through Sunday in its shops in Seoul, while a half-an-hour extension will be effective at the Shinsegae Department Store’s main branch in central Seoul until Monday, one day before Chuseok.
Sales at South Korea’s top three department stores hit a 14-month high in August, rising 5.6 percent from a year earlier. The result sparked hopes for improvements in consumption amid signs of an economic upturn.
To catch up with such a trend, the Bank of Korea projected that cash demand for the Chuseok holidays would amount to 4.3 trillion won, up about 200 billion won from that last year.
``Traditional markets are also enjoying rising sales, probably for the first time since the Asian financial crisis,’’ said a dried-goods owner in Namdaemun Market.