The 2019 holiday season had several retail segments outperform the average, in addition to some underperformers.
Mastercard SpendingPulse, which tracks spending patterns across channels, has visibility into how these retail categories performed.
“This year, apparel was up 1%—essentially flat. So, this was not an apparel season,” said Steve Sadove, former chairman and CEO of Saks and senior advisor to Mastercard.
“This was more of an electronics season, which was up 4.6%. ... Jewelry held up pretty well during the holiday season; department stores didn’t,” he said. “Department stores is one of the only categories that was negative on a negative.” In other words, it had a year-over-year decline in 2019 following a year-over-year decline the previous year.
Many of the same category trends occurred on the ecommerce side of the ledger, pointing to category strength and weakness rather than channel-shifting. According to Rakuten Intelligence, the top-gaining ecommerce category this past season was home improvement, which grew 43.9% vs. a year ago. Consumer electronics/major appliances jumped 17.7% to rank among the leaders, on the strength of smartphones, wearables and smart-home electronics, while apparel/footwear grew by single digits (8.4%)—several points below the ecommerce channel overall.