Holiday Trouble for the Retailers?
As Black Friday approaches, Cramer’s expecting the talking heads to squawk endlessly about the woes of retailers this holiday season. They’ll say the stores have no choice but to offer outrageous discounts to draw customers through their doors. After all, the consumer’s weak and unemployment’s still close to 10 percent.
“And they will be wrong,” Cramer said.
A quick review of any of the conference calls last week—Home Depot , Urban Outfitters , Target —showed evidence of what should be the best holidays these companies have seen in years. None of them, Cramer said, save just Sears and Jones Group, had a negative thing to say.
The “Mad Money” host pointed to declining credit problems at Target, strong sneaker sales at Footlocker and Nordstrom’s lean inventories. Against this good news were maybe a half dozen articles about how TVs were being discounted, all of them linking television sales to the possibility of a humbug holiday.
But investors need to steal themselves to this, Cramer said. Hedge funds may try to rumor down the sector, the retailers themselves may try to make it sound like they’re giving away merchandise to bring in more customers, but that will be far from the truth.
‘The retailers are ready, and not even online, which will be incredibly powerful, is going to hurt them,” Cramer said. “Retail stocks—they’re going higher.”
When this story published, Cramer's charitable trust owned Home Depot.
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