NORTHAMPTON — Of all the gems, curative oils and other spiritual gifts that Bud Neiswender sold this holiday season, one item in particular flew off her shelves: air-cleansing Himalayan salt lamps.
“It’s literally just a chunk of Himalayan salt,” said Neiswender, one of the owners of Northampton’s Inspirit Crystals. “I don’t know if Oprah said she had one or what, but it went crazy this year.”
Neiswender’s lamps shed light on a broader trend this holiday season. Despite early predictions that online shopping would negatively impact business, retailers are having one of their best holiday seasons in years, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Eileen Corbeil, 65, has owned White Square Books in Easthampton for nearly six years, and this year her holiday sales were off the charts.
“October was incredibly slow and I was getting incredibly worried,” she said, taking a break from placing orders for new books. “But after Thanksgiving, it just boomed.”
That new-book smell hangs thick in Corbeil’s store, and that is what she says is selling best. Despite her collection of used and rare books, brand-new copies of popular titles like Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees” have been flying off the shelves, but so have other unexpected books. “I can’t keep in stock a $30 book on Icelandic sagas,” she says laughing.
“You read the L.A. Times or the Washington Post and it says independent bookstores are doing well and you go, ‘Yeah right!’” she said. “But I’m seeing it.”
As much as the holiday season has helped, however, she attributes the economic boon to a confluence of factors.
“It’s been such a traumatic fall, people are going back to the basics,” she said.
Just down Cottage Street, 43-year-old Shelly Bacis was comfortably slouched behind a laptop at the back of Custom Cycle Bike Shop, surrounded by hanging bicycles and brightly colored tires. She’s married to the store’s owner, and says the holidays have been good to them, despite the unseasonal nature of her merchandise.
“This Christmas definitely seems like it has been busier than this past Christmas,” she said, despite the rest of the year being slower than most. Scooters, she said, sold more than any other item; the store only had one left in stock on Thursday.
Pundits this year have been predicting that online shopping would hurt brick-and-mortar stores, but The Wall Street Journal reports that several industry research firms have found that sales growth in the past two months could be larger than in years past.
A recent survey from the National Retail Federation found that 90 percent of holiday shoppers still hadn’t purchased their gifts ahead of the traditionally busy Super Saturday on Dec. 17. Several store owners in the Pioneer Valley said the large snowstorm that Saturday hurt their businesses, but according to Reuters, it was actually a spike in sales in the final week before Christmas that drove positive sales trends at brick-and-mortar stores.
Those trends certainly benefitted Amherst’s Cathie Walz, 53, who has owned The Blue Marble gift shop for close to 10 years.
“It’s been fabulous,” she said while attending to several customers browsing everything from earrings and sock puppets to fair-trade, Star Wars-themed hats. “Business has been good, brisk, people have been cheerful and happy to be out.”
Like Corbeil, the Easthampton bookstore owner, Walz attributes some of the good business to the year’s political climate.
“I think it has been a difficult year, so most folks are making more of an effort to appreciate the good things,” Walz said.
“Both stores have been ridiculously busy,” she said, referring to her other location in Northampton.
And that’s not just true of Walz’s Northampton location. Jena Sujat said her artisan gallery and boutique Pinch, off Main Street, has benefited from the generally mild weather.
“It’s been a really great year,” she said, though not as good as last year. “Last December was the best December we ever had.”
Even as snowfall grew heavy on Thursday afternoon, a constant stream of customers filed through Pinch,
In particular, ceramic plates and mugs featuring the faces of political figures have been selling quickly. The best selling? A plate featuring Michelle and Barack Obama smiling and hugging, surrounded by colorful flowers and birds.
Other popular politicians include Sen. Elizabeth Warren and founding father turned Broadway superstar Alexander Hamilton, both sold out.
And just like Walz’s Yoda-shaped hats, Sujat’s store may also benefit from the buzz around the Star Wars movies. Near the politicians is another familiar face: the recently deceased Carrie Fisher, of Princess Leia fame.
“That’s probably going to sell now,” Sujat said sadly.