After Christmas Is When Many Retailers & Consumers Hope To Cash In
By Matt Rivers
PHILADELPHIA (CBS)--For consumers, today is all about exchanging or returning gifts, but retailers want it to be about discounts and perhaps using those gift cards Santa put under the tree.
Come to exchange a gift, stay for fifty percent off here, 80 percent off there.
Find a store in the mall not offering a deal or six and you've found the needle in the haystack.
Ashley Pompei, the marketing director of the Montgomery Mall says, "This is the very end of the year so they're trying to get their final sales in."
Using deep discounts and staying open longer to do so.
Inside the Mall, retailers like H&M offered scratch and save cards on top of big price cuts.
Outside the mall, Toys 'r Us is open until 10 p.m. and Best Buy slashed prices on some items by as much as 70 percent.
A customer says, "What are we out here doing today? Spending Christmas money."
Music to retailer ears, after a shorter shopping season and some very snowy days.
The saving grace might be gift cards. The National Retail Federation says a record 29 billion dollars worth were bought this year.
Shopper, Mike Sanguinetti says, "I believe it, I got seventy or eighty bucks worth so there's a lot of people out there, I agree."
Gift cards and discounts mean a lot to mom Filippa, who we found looking for gifts to save for a later day.
"Both me and my husband work so it's been tough so looking for deals, whatever we can do."
She is making sure daughter Ella is this happy next year.
"I got this jacket. Is it warm? Yeah."
And because Christmas was in the middle of the week, many of these retailers will be offering these discounts, opening earlier, and staying open later through the end of the week.
