Dive Brief:

• In one of the season’s earliest forecasts, the financial services company Deloitte said that holiday retail sales could rise 4% thanks to an improving economy.

• That would beat last holiday season’s 2.8% sales growth, according to number-crunching by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

• Such a rise will take plenty of discounts and promotions for retailers that fail to attract shoppers early, before their budgets have been whittled down, experts say.

Dive Insight:

We’ll be seeing a lot of these forecasts, so this is an early and optimistic call from Deloitte. Certainly the “good economic fundamentals” cited by the company's researchers are real, and, as the firm says, better than last year. But there are other factors in the current economy that seem to be keeping consumers wary. Sluggish employment figures and wages on the lower end of the economic scale mean that those fundamentals aren’t sinking in for many consumers.