Shopping numbers give economic hope 

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Shoppers are showing their optimism by upping their spending this holiday season, both online and in traditional stores, new reports revealed Tuesday.

On “Super Saturday,” the last Saturday before Christmas, retail sales jumped 15.1 percent this past Saturday from 2009, with shoppers laying out a collective $7.58 billion nationwide, according to Chicago-based research firm ShopperTrak. The results look particularly rosy because last year’s holiday shopping took a hit from a blizzard on the Eastern seaboard.

ShopperTrak predicts “Super Saturday” will be the second-largest shopper traffic day of this holiday season and the third-largest sales day, behind “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving when the season kicked off. Sales on “Black Friday” totaled $10.7 billion, according to ShopperTrak.

This year’s second-biggest holiday shopping revenue day is expected Thursday, when procrastinators will flock to stores to snap up last-minute gifts. Some retailers count on the Christmas season for one-third of their total yearly revenues.

E-commerce sales have jumped 12 percent this holiday season from a year ago, according to a Comscore report. Online sales grew to $27.5 billion, with one-fifth of the sales occurring Dec. 13-18.

Mobile and social shopping are emerging as this year’s trends, with retailers posting special deals for shoppers who “friend” the stores on Facebook, scan special coupon codes and meet their friends to take advantage of in-store sales. Sears Holdings Corp., the Hoffman Estates-based parent company of Sears and Kmart, offered Kmart shoppers for the first time this holiday season a “buy online, pick up in store” feature; embedded so-called QR codes in a Sunday newspaper circular and in the Sears Wish Book online catalog that enabled readers to scan the codes with their mobile devices to jump to Web-based product descriptions, videos and reviews, and offered a “wish together” feature with the catalog in which shoppers who joined together to reach a required number of “likes” for a product were able to unlock a deal on that item, said Imran Jooma, Sears’ president of ecommerce.

Shoppers most often scanned QR codes from the Wish Book for a Samsung 3D LED TV set, a Nintendo Wii bundle and a Microsoft Kinect, according to Sears research results.

Shoppers also are eager to buy smart phones, iPads, ebook readers and computers to keep up with the latest technological advances, boosting China’s exports of electronic products by 4.5 percent in September, the latest data available, as retailers stocked up on inventory, according to research firm iSuppli.

Retailers are extending their hours in hopes that shoppers haven’t checked off everyone on their lists. Toys “R” Us will stay open for 88 consecutive hours, through 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve; three suburban Macy’s stores, at Woodfield, Oakbrook and Orland Square malls, are open continuously until 6 p.m. Christmas Eve, and Kmart stores are open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Christmas Eve.