Susie's Deals survives holiday season intact

I always seem to be writing about negative things on this blog.

I don't know why that is. But it might have something to do with the fact that we're mired in a deep recession - a recession in which people have lost their homes, layoffs are ramping up, banks are struggling and hardly anyone seems to be able to get credit.

Still ... I digress. As they used to say on Monty Python, "and now, for something completely different ..." 

On Thursday, most of the nation's big retailers reported dismal sales results for December. That wasn't unexpected. But one local retailer, Susie's Deals, managed to pull through the holiday season largely unscathed.

The Ontario-based clothing chain has a distinct advantage in that every piece of merchandise it sells goes for $5.99 or less. Now I've never been to one of these stores, but I plan to go soon because those are definitely my kind of prices - low.

Long before many U.S. retailers began to grapple with declining sales and well before Mervyn's and Linen's 'n Things declared bankruptcy, this company took evasive action.

"Basically, we expected this," said Susie Hyman, founder and owner of Susie's Deals, which operates about 15 locations in the San Gabriel Valley. "We watched our inventory and cut all of the the fat off the business."

The company's 2008 holiday sales didn't keep pace with holiday sales from the previous year, she said, but Susie's Deals managed to hold its own.

"We're finding that department store customers are starting to shop for values in our stores," Hyman said Thursday. That's good to hear because we need some positive news. And just to make things even more upbeat, here's something else that's positive.