In brief: Super Saturday a bust in the east

New York – Super Saturday – the last Saturday before Christmas and usually ranked as the biggest or second-biggest sales day of the year – got walloped by a big East Coast snow storm that kept many shoppers at home.

Merchants in the Northeast are now left to hope for an even bigger-than-usual last-minute spending surge from shoppers. Several stores, including Target Corp. and Toys R Us, announced earlier this week they will extend their hours to accommodate shoppers in the final days before Christmas.

Research firm ShopperTrak reported Tuesday that Super Saturday sales dropped 12.6 percent from a year ago, while foot traffic fell 12.4 percent.

“Mother Nature was very unkind to retailers on Saturday,” Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak, said in a statement.

But Martin said he’s still sticking to his prediction for a 1.6 percent sales gain for the overall holiday period, forecasting shoppers will be out in full force in the final days before Christmas.

Associated Press

Microsoft loses in ruling on Word

Seattle – A federal appeals court ordered Microsoft Corp. to stop selling its Word program in January and pay a Canadian software company $290 million for violating a patent, upholding the judgment of a lower court.

But people looking to buy Word or Microsoft’s Office package in the U.S. won’t have to go without the software. Microsoft said Tuesday it expects that new versions of the product, with the computer code in question removed, will be ready for sale when the injunction begins on Jan. 11.

Toronto-based i4i Inc. sued Microsoft in 2007, saying it owned the technology behind a tool in the popular word processing program. The technology in question gives Word users an improved way to edit XML, or code that tells the program how to interpret and display a document’s contents.

Associated Press

Obama praises smaller banks

Washington – President Barack Obama took his plea for more small-business lending to community bankers Tuesday, but his prodding was far gentler than it was with high-finance CEOs last week.

The president offered to help ease regulation that bankers say has restricted lending. He praised the small bankers as pillars of their communities. And he listened sympathetically to their pleas for easier access to capital.

The tone of the meeting with 12 regional bankers and top administration officials differed from last week when he famously called top bankers “fat cats” in a television interview and then told them in a White House meeting that they had a responsibility to make “an extraordinary commitment” to help rebuild the economy.

Associated Press