Janet Reed plans to limit holiday shopping to compact discs at her neighborhood Barnes & Noble rather than designer clothes at Saks Fifth Avenue or Barneys New York should transit workers strike tomorrow.
"You have to change your strategies," said Reed, 35, a television writer whose Upper West Side apartment is about3.2km from midtown Manhattan.
"I can't imagine I would come down here and then carry all the bags back home."
Some shoppers, like Reed, who use public transportation, and others, who drive to New York's retail districts during the holiday season, said a walkout by the 34,000 members of Transport Workers Union Local 100 would send them to neighborhood stores, suburban shopping malls and the Internet.
New York City might lose as much as US$50 million of its estimated US$275 million a day in retail sales, said Michael Sherman, spokesman for the city's economic development corporation. Tax revenue, including sales tax, personal income and business income taxes, is forecast to be as much as US$5 million a day lower than normal, he said.
"It's not an implausible scenario," said James Parrott, chief economist with the Fiscal Policy Institute, an economic research group partly funded by New York's labor unions. "Mass transit is the economic lifeblood of the New York economy. You take it away and the blood doesn't flow."
Walter Loeb, president of Loeb Associates Inc., a New York-based retail consultant, said, "it's going to have a disastrous effect. People will not be able to get to the stores."
The union's contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates city buses and subways, expires at 12am New York time Sunday.
While negotiations continued last night after a state Supreme Court justice issued a preliminary injunction to block a strike, a walkout remained possible.
"Our energy will be focused on the bargaining table, and a settlement will be reached by negotiations and not by injunctions," said Roger Toussaint, president of Local 100.
Transit workers, with an average annual salary of US$44,000, are seeking increases totaling 18 percent over the next three years. The transit agency has proposed no salary changes in the first year and subsequent raises tied to productivity gains. The agency has said it is facing a deficit of almost US$2.8 million in the next two years.
A transit walkout would shift shoppers out of Manhattan stores and into businesses closer to where they live, said Todd Slater, an analyst at Lazard Freres & Co. "People are still going to shop," said Slater, who covers retail stocks including Gap Inc and Limited Brands and doesn't own any of them.
Andrea Hansen, 32, marketing director for privately held jewelry retailer H. Stern on Fifth Avenue, said she expected her suburban customers to cancel shopping trips to Manhattan in the event of a walkout tomorrow.
"If there's a strike, we are going to lose the best shopping week of the season -- the week before Christmas," Hansen said.
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