AN OLD-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS for retailers, these days, would be anything before last year

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - VSN TopLine — Wednesday, Nov. 10, 1999 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - © Copyright 1999, VSN Strategies Holiday Sales: Will Vstores Lead or Follow? AN “OLD-FASHIONED” CHRISTMAS, for retailers, would be anything before last year. They hearken back to when “e-commerce” would have been an unintelligible term, when Wal-Mart’s biggest strategic dilemma was whether to sell groceries, and when the annual holiday shopping speculation centered simply on how much more or less would occur than the year before. Well, the e-tail is wagging the dog again this year when it comes to the buzz about the holiday retailing season. Even though online sales remain a small fraction of overall spending in this country, the most talk surrounds speculation about how high e-retailing will fly. Projections range from the $6 billion that Jupiter Communications expects online consumers to spend on the holidays, to the $7.3 billion recently prognosticated by eMarketer, to the $12.2 billion just projected by the Gartner Group’s DataQuest Inc. unit. (Another divergent set of projections is that for online sales for 1999 as a whole, which includes DataQuest’s guess of $31.2 billion and Forrester Research’s prediction of $20.2 billion — but that’s another story.) In any event, most pundits and retailers expect at least a doubling of the $3 billion to $4 billion that was spent ...