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Mixed Retail Picture: Visa Edition

You folks posted alot of good comments yesterday following the discussion on increased Credit Card usage in the mixed retail post. Enough issues were raised that I tracked down some people at Visa to get a breakdown of the specific data regarding card usage over the weekend:

Spending on Friday/Saturday with Visa branded cards was over $7.068 billion dollars; This represents a 15% increase versus 2004.

• $3.84 B was consumer credit;
• $2.82 B was debit/check cards;
• $400M was Visa Commercial/Small Business cards (a form of commercial credit).

That means approximately 54% of the increase in card usage was added consumer debt. 

Another interesting data point:  E-Commerce was $544 million, a 32% increase from 2004. That number is consistent with the past 5 years of growth online. Note, however, that online purchases are a mere 7.6% of total retail sales.

Also, Travel spending was up 19% to $974 million -- reflecting in large part increased energy costs for airlines and autos.

Note that these are actual sales receipts, and not opinion or expectations of spending. Its is therefore a significant data point.

>

UPDATE November 29, 2005  10:49am

Here is the Visa data release
Spendtrak_report_twoday_11_2526_05_.pdf

Tuesday, November 29, 2005 | 05:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)
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Comments

I work for a pretty large general merchandise retailer (2+ billion annual sales) and for what its worth, we are recording a 13.9% sales increase over the 3 days (Fri-Sat-Sun). But interestingly, our customer count was down 2.8% while the average ticket was up 17%.

Posted by: Anon | Nov 29, 2005 8:44:50 AM