National Retail Federation

NRF Expects Solid Growth This Holiday Season

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The National Retail Federation has released its forecast for this year's holiday sales: an increase of 4.1%—higher than the 10-year average holiday-sales increase of 3.5%. “This is the most optimistic forecast NRF has released since the recession," says NRF president and CEO Matthew Shay. "In spite of the uncertainties that exist in our economy and among consumers, we believe we’ll see solid holiday-sales growth this year.

National Retail Federation: B-T-S Spending to Grow This Year

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National Retail Federation: B-T-S Spending to Grow This Year

So how's your back-to-school sales of beauty products going? Are your lice-prevention haircare products selling well? There are still B-T-S dollars out there.

The average person with a child in elementary, middle or high school will spend $688.62 this B-T-S season, reports the National Retail Federation's 2012 back-to-school spending survey conducted by BIGinsight. That's up from $603.63 last season.

Social-Media, Mobile Shopping Becoming the Norm

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Courtesy of Pinterest

Shoppers’ use of Pinterest to connect to retailers has exceeded both their Facebook and Twitter use, according to the 2012 “Social and Mobile Commerce Study”—a joint research project by the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org division, digital business-analytics firm comScore and global-strategy and management consulting firm T

NRF Addresses Mobile-Payment Regulation

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thinkstock.com/Hemera Collection

The National Retail Federation has urged the Federal Trade Commission to move cautiously in establishing regulations for mobile payments, and said any rules that are adopted should parallel those for the underlying form of payment and not be specific to the technology.

NRF Announces Retail Video Contest Finalists

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The National Retail Federation has announced the top 10 finalists of its “This is Retail” video contest, which were determined after a week of public voting through NRF’s Retail Means Jobs website. More than 245,000 votes were cast for the Top 20 finalists between April 3 and April 8.

Americans To Save Their Tax Refunds

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thinkstock.com/iStockphoto collection

More Americans intend to save—rather than spend—their federal tax refunds this year, according to the National Retail Federation’s “Tax Returns Consumer Survey” conducted by consumer-intelligence firm BIGinsight.

Two-thirds of taxpayers are expecting a refund this year—the exact same as last year. Nearly 44% of them are expected to stash away some of their refund in savings—the most in the survey’s nine-year history (and up 2% from last year).

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