RETAILING: Leadin Toward A Green Christmas

On any given day, Dr. Spock might be glimpsed there selecting towels, Walter Matthau trying on suits. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis recently passed through to order presents to be sent to Caroline in London. Singer Diana Ross outfits herself and her children there−by long distance from California. Basketball Star Earl Monroe may drop in to pick up some after-shave lotion−and, he says, to "see how people with money act."

What is this emporium? It is Bloomingdale's, the flashy department store on Manhattan's East Side. Now, as Christmas approaches, more than 300,000 shoppers weekly−some 60,000 on Saturday alone−surge through the store's eleven floors. While ogling the merchandise, they also eye each other. For Bloomingdale's is both a neighborhood center and celebrity hangout, a place where the next person a shopper bumps into (literally) may be either an acquaintance or someone familiar from a thousand newspaper photographs.

But the big attraction is the merchandise−thousands upon thousands of items chosen in part for high style and displayed with show business flair. Shoppers swarm about high-fashion boutiques, fondling designs by Anne Klein and Yves Saint Laurent. They taste fruitcake samples in the lavishly stocked Delicacies Shop, which among its 7,000 items has 146 varieties of bread and 300 kinds of cheese. Coos Lee Radziwill, Jackie Onassis' sister: "It's the obvious place to go for everything. Oh gosh, it's the most fantastic and exhausting store in the world."

During the next four weeks, the pace will become even more exhausting for shoppers at the trendy Manhattan Bloomingdale's, the eleven other Bloomingdale's stores in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and the thousands of other department and specialty stores throughout the country. These are the weeks when retailers ring up a quarter to a third of their annual sales, the period that largely determines whether the year goes into merchants' ledgers as a success, like 1973, or a disaster, like 1974.

This year storekeepers are entering their critical period in an optimistic mood. Retailers are predicting an increase in Christmas sales of around 10% over last year. Even discounting the fact that consumer prices are about 7.5% higher than a year ago, that would leave a real gain. Bloomingdale's President Marvin S. Traub says his store could post about a 15% gain over 1974, when the economy was skidding toward the bottom of its worst slump since the 1930s.

Joseph L. Hudson Jr., chairman of the J.L. Hudson Co., Detroit's biggest department store, believes sales will even be "several percentage points" above the record-breaking pre-recession Christmas of 1973. Meyer Zolkower, regional general manager for New York-based Franklin Simon, a group of specialty shops, forecasts that the sales surge will carry into 1976 as well.