Jolly Old Bergdorf's

Bergdorf Goodman will be serving its holiday shoppers football games and good scotch.

According to a report in The New York Times, the elegant Manhattan specialty apparel store will be resorting to unprecedented in-store devices to perk up its November and December sales. It will be installing a TV set in the men's store and offering 25-year-old whisky for customers to sip while they shop. Bergdorf's will also have its first Christmas tree ever and, says The Times, “the first Santa Claus in the memory of anyone currently working there.”

In the face of grim forecasts for the holiday shopping season, a time in which retailers frequently do as much as 20 percent of their annual sales, Bergdorf's has held sales for regular customers in which it has reduced prices on most items by up to 30 percent.

The Fifth Avenue retailer, part of the struggling Neiman Marcus Group (Dallas), says it feels particularly vulnerable because it has no suburban branches to cushion a decline in sales. It has only its two stores – one for men and one for women – across the street from one another. In September, both Bergdorf Goodman and its parent, which operates 33 Neiman Marcus stores, announced that they were canceling all fall orders in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, with the exception of special orders, and were scaling back “resort” and spring orders.