Peter Hiskes, who works at Outdoor Gear Exchange on Burlington’s Church Street, said the crowds along the shopping destination last weekend were the biggest he’s seen since before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Many people were drawn in by graduation weekend at the University of Vermont and came to peruse the popular outdoor sports store.
“Seeing Church Street just packed with people was really encouraging,” said Hiskes, the business’s senior director of retail.
But exactly how Vermont retailers are doing — and whether any momentum will carry through the summer — remains hard to gauge and predict.
Figures from the Vermont Department of Taxes show a year-over-year increase in retail sales of 4.5% from January 2022 to January 2023. But more recent figures are not available.
And Art Woolf, associate professor emeritus of economics at the University of Vermont, said that if sales are not increasing year over year by at least 5%, they are losing ground to inflation, which means people are spending less.
On the whole, Vermont retailers are still struggling to regain customers from national websites, said Bill Calfee, founder of myti.com, a Burlington-based website launching in June that encourages people shopping online to shop locally.
Calfee said Vermont retailers report that customers are coming back, but not to pre-pandemic numbers. He cites online purchases from national websites as the main reason. Chittenden County residents are spending $100 million a year on Amazon alone, Calfee said.
“That’s $100 million that’s extracted from our economy,” he said.
For stores that rely largely on tourists, such as Danforth Pewter, the threat can be muted. Bram Kleppner, the outfit’s chief executive officer, said overall sales at the chain’s nine stores, including the five in Vermont, are up more than 10% from last year at this time.
He said managers at all nine stores report that more visitors are coming through the door.
“So far this year, things have felt good in our brick-and-mortar stores,” Kleppner said. “It feels to them as though this is pent-up pandemic desire to travel and to visit places and to shop.”
Jane Kolodinsky, chair of the community development and applied economics department at the University of Vermont College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, shared the managers’ assessment.
“At the end of Covid, we see that people just can’t wait to socialize and get in touch with people,” she said, “and touch merchandise and buy merchandise because we were sequestered in our homes.”
Some observers say that, in addition to acting on pent-up demand, some shoppers found new activities and new ways to spend money during the height of the pandemic — and those spending habits have continued.
Kelly Devine, executive director of the Burlington Business Association, said the city’s outdoor gear stores have done well, thanks to increased interest in the outdoors spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, an interest that continues to be strong.
But at Outdoor Gear Exchange, Hiskes offered a more nuanced view. The store had a “pretty strong” April, followed by a dip in May that stayed low until shoppers poured in on graduation weekend.
“It underscores that our business is more uncertain and unpredictable than ever right now,” he said.
Asked why, he replied: “I wish I knew exactly the answer.”
One thing that has changed since the pandemic, Hiskes said, is that the store has plenty of inventory. After supply-chain problems were worked out, he said, backed-up orders filled the store just as demand decreased.
“We ended up with a ton of stuff,” he said. “Frankly, we have too much inventory in some categories, which we’re trying to move.”
At Lake Champlain Chocolates, which has three stores in Burlington and Waterbury, “business is good,” said Meghan Fitzpatrick, a company spokesperson. Fitzpatrick said the chocolate maker’s sales are up 20% from pre-pandemic figures, although she added that there has been a 5% decline in sales over the last 12 months.
Fitzpatrick said customers found their way to Lake Champlain Chocolates stores as they started to go out again after the worst parts of the pandemic, but were still reluctant to go to restaurants, so they opted to come in to buy ice cream or chocolate to take home.
Now that people are back in restaurants in full force, she said, they come a little less to the chocolate stores, but still in greater numbers than before the pandemic.
Online sales grew 62% from 2020 to 2021, but also have declined slightly since, she said.
Hiskes, with the Outdoor Gear Exchange, said uncertainty about the direction of the U.S. economy remains a worry, fueled by continuing inflation, high interest rates, and the threat that the United States could default on its debt.
He said public safety concerns in Burlington also complicate the store’s financial situation, including “pretty significant retail theft” that has been “really challenging.”
Devine said other retailers in the city are reporting similar problems, with most of the association’s large retailers posting annual losses “in the six-figure area” due to theft.
“You can’t talk about the state of retail without talking about retail theft because if a store is losing $100,000 to $150,000 a year, that impacts the price,” Devine said. “It impacts availability of goods. It impacts their ability to hire.”
According to statistics provided by Jon Murad, acting chief of the Burlington Police Department, reports of retail theft in the city this year are nearly triple over the same period last year. Stores reported 204 retail thefts between Jan. 1 and May 15 this year, compared to 73 retail thefts in the same period last year.
In an email to VTDigger, Murad said this year’s figures are also running 191% above the city’s previous year-to-date five-year average.
Devine said stores have reported reducing hours because employees do not want to work past dark.
She said Burlington stores are also struggling to attract employees. Statewide, the number of people employed in retail trade in Vermont rose slightly in April from March, from 35,600 to 35,700, and was running ahead of the 34,900 retail employees in April 2022, according to the Vermont Department of Labor.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Bram Kleppner’s name.