• Detroit News, Wall Street Journal, Hartford Courant, Business Week, Chicago Tribune , Friday, November 14, 2008 11:15 AM

We cited a survey the other day that found that shoppers were becoming leery about their retailers. And while Marketing Daily's Sarah Mahoney reports solid quarterly profits for Wal-Mart, overall retail sales took a record dive of 2.8% in October, according to figures released by the Commerce Dept. this morning.

Now comes word from the Detroit News that "household gifts" such as furniture, television sets and family vacations may replace a lot of individual gifts under the tree this year. (How does Santa get a 60-inch plasma, not to mention a trip to Orlando, down the chimney?)

Shopkeeps aren't just sitting around feeling sorry for themselves. They're slashing and branding and organizing. Let's start with the organizing.

Wal-Mart is forming a grassroots army in New England called the Consumer Action Network (CAN) that "can," for example, "counter the citizens groups and policy-makers that oppose its expansion plans," Janice Podsada reports in the Hartford Courant. Using an outside firm, the company set up booths outside stores this summer and recruited more than 61,000 New England residents' 25,218 from Connecticut alone. Modeled on an existing California Customer Action Network, it's Wal-Mart's first attempt to organize a regional support group.

"When government tries to limit your shopping choices, CAN members can help by expressing their opinion," a CAN flier says.

"It came about at the store level," says company spokesman Chris Buchanan. "Customers said they would like to be more involved with the company. That's where it sprung from."

Besides agitating for more Wal-Marts in their communities, fighting zoning restrictions, preventing governmental bans on plastic shopping bags and correcting false information and misleading quotes, the group also gives beleaguered supporters a warm-and-nurturing environment in which to express themselves. "I would stick up for Wal-Mart as strong as I can," one shopper tells Podsada. "I really think they've gotten an unfair shake."

More cynical Yankees -- and that would include Al Norman, a Massachusetts activist who has spearheaded campaigns against Wal-Mart -- say Wal-Mart should stick to "selling cheap underwear and bananas" and forgo the community organizing. "A lot of people signed up for this group, thinking they were going to get information about the next sale," he claims.

Other retailers are resorting to more tried methods of wooing shoppers and hoping that they remain true. A survey from the National Retail Federation shows that 52% of retailers plan to make return policies more flexible for customers wanting to bring back duplicate or unwanted gifts after the holidays, up from 35% a year ago, according to an AP dispatch in Business Week.

Sears, meanwhile, is following the lead of its corporate cousin, Kmart, and will bring back the layaway plan to its namesake stores starting Sunday, nearly two decades after it was scrapped, according to the Chicago Tribune. Kmart has maintained the program for decades, but only began promoting it heavily last month. Executives say the results have been "tremendous."? Finally, USA Today reports that an idea that seemed like a no-brainer to some retailers a few years ago -- keeping their store-branded credit cards on their own books -- is coming back to take a big bite out of their bottom lines.

"Most retailers unloaded their credit card portfolios to banks," write Jayne O'Donnell and Kathy Chu, but Target, Nordstrom and a handful of other retailers held onto the accounts themselves. The concept was great when the economy was chugging along and shoppers blithely rang up charges with interest rates of 20% or more.

"But when the economy sours, those rates can make it harder for consumers to pay their bills, pushing charge-offs -- when banks give up on collecting debt -- on retail cards higher and faster than on general-purpose cards," O'Donnell and Chu report.

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