Summer sales are in full swing, with department stores and smaller retailers selling off some of their stock at slashed prices.

Both Trimingham's and Gibbons Company offered reductions anywhere from 25 percent to 75 percent off their goods - making way for Cup Match stock due in over the next few weeks.

And other smaller stores have been following their lead, offering discounts from ten percent and up. There are mixed reports from retailers with sales to locals buoyant - but tourist-related sales still suffering through the summer.

Peter Cooper, managing director of A.S. Cooper & Sons, said that this side of their business was lagging from between two and 15 percent.

He said: "It was the same trend May and has been so far all this year. The other departments are holding their own, however."

And he said the new men's store they opened is doing "fine", a store he said catered to both tourists and locals alike.

"From the tourist point of view it is worse than last year," he said. The store has been undergoing a modernisation and renovating many departments, but still has its main Front Street floor dedicated to tourists. It also has the Cachet Store and various hotel stores which cater to hotel guest.

"Our local business is holding up well," he said. When asked if he would open a women's store like the new men's store on Front Street, he said: "Find me the store and we will do it. In a way I am joking but I am not joking."

He said they had done a lot to improve the department store since the men's department moved, putting the children's department where the men's store used to be. The plus sizes for women are now where the children's store used to be and they are renovating the Hamilton Princess store and moving into the site which had been occupied by Calypso. "We are also adding a unit onto the dockyard shop to help us cater for the big ships. The Bank of Butterfield had a space next to us, we asked if we could have it, so will renovate that. But the tourist figures in general are down."

David Hamshere, the president of the TESS Group which owns a whole host of stores across the Island, from up market Ceciles in town to Taylors in St. George's, said that sales in June had been good - but July looked slower already.

"We are certainly holding our own," he said. "I wouldn't say that things are fantastic. Certainly the July 4 weekend sales were not so good, but through June we were running along very nicely. "What we are getting a feel of is that we have been busy right the way through June and seemed to us the first week of July that the holiday weekend did not give us the same level of business we were searching for."

Mr. Hamshere said that his stores - Ceciles, Crown Colony, Levis, M&S, English Sports Shop, Nauticus, in the Fairmont Southampton and the Hamilton Princess, and in Sonesta and Elbow Beach as well as Taylors - was a balance between the local and tourist related,

"That balance has been dictated by fall off in tourist numbers and we have had to look at building our local base," he added. "But July doesn't seem to be showing the same increases. I don't know if the hot weather is getting to people and they are a little tired. But we retailers by nature are optimistic, and so far we are surviving."