*Election Delay Could Halt Consumer Spending
The delay in determining who the nation's president is may have an effect on catalogers accomplishing their holiday season sales goals, according to one catalog industry consultant."People seem to crawl into a shell and suspend many of their normal activities until they know who the leader of the country is," said Maxwell Sroge, president of Maxwell Sroge Co., a catalog consulting firm in Evanston, IL.
If there are further delays with court challenges, which could cause consumers to delay their holiday purchasing, the affect on the Christmas shopping season could be devastating, Sroge predicts.
Normally there are six weeks after an election for merchandisers to realize their critically important year ending sales, Sroge said. If two of those six weeks are negatively impacted by the election delay, sales increases originally predicted could be cut, he added.
