Orange County’s two major mall retailers, Anaheim’s Pacific Sunwear of California Inc. and Foothill Ranch-based Wet Seal Inc., saw drops in March same-store sales that went beyond Wall Street expectations.
Pacific Sunwear, which is restructuring to focus on stores selling clothes inspired by surfing, saw sales at stores open at least a year fall 8% last month.
The showing disappointed Wall Street, which was expecting a 1.7% drop.
Investors seemed to discount the drop, sending Pacific Sunwear’s shares up 2.4% Thursday on a market value of about $910 million.
Some could be betting that retailers have better times ahead. Other buying could have come from short sellers looking to cover their positions. Short sellers bet on a fall in a company’s shares.
Pacific Sunwear’s same-store sales figure was just for the company’s PacSun surfwear chain. Pacific Sunwear is in the process of closing its smaller chain of demo stores selling urban-style clothes. It earlier closed shoe store chain One Thousand Steps.
Total sales for the five weeks ended April 5 were off 8% to $115.3 million.
Wet Seal Inc., which sells clothes for teen girls and young women, saw March same-store sales fall 10.8%, steeper than the 7.5% decline analysts had expected.
The company blamed the retail slowdown, early Easter and poor results from its Arden B chain for young women.
Wet Seal’s shares closed up nearly 2% on a market value of $300 million.
Total sales for the five weeks ended April 5 rose nearly 1% to $58.1 million.
