It may still be September, but retail giant Walmart is already preparing for the Christmas holiday shopping season.
The company recently announced its top 25 picks for the year’s hottest toys, as chosen by a team of the world’s best experts: the kids themselves. Walmart invited hundreds of children ages 18 months to 12 years to test out new lines of play items and choose which ones they liked best.
Among the top picks were the doll-sized My Life As a Food Truck; the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mega Lair Playset; a Walmart exclusive Disney Princess Carriage; and the Hot Wheels A.I. Racing Playset.
“Whatever your child is interested in, there’s a great toy this year in that category, and I think that’s what’s driving the health of the business,” said Anne Marie Kehoe, vice president of toys for Walmart U.S..
The National Retail Federation predicts that sales for the 2016 year will grow by 3.4% over last year, surpassing the three percent growth from 2014 to 2015. The holiday season is especially crucial for the toy industry, which sees 70% of all its sales in November and December each year.
Walmart also announced that its layaway payment program is now open for gift-givers who want to start putting down payments on holiday purchases. Since 75% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and 27% have no savings at all, the layaway program can be a way to ensure all those gifts are bought and paid for before the hectic holiday season.
“While we may think it’s a long time till Christmas, for many customers, it really is a need and a want, so it just gives them that time,” Kehoe said.
The full list of must-have toys for the season is broken down by characteristic categories: toys for entrepreneurial kids, imaginative kids, caregiving kids, independent kids, or thrill-seeking kids.
13Sep
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