CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Time for a little -- time for a little 'Business Buzz' right now. Forget the malls, more Americans did their holiday shopping on the Web this year. Sasha Salama has the story live from the Nasdaq market site. Good morning.</s>SASHA SALAMA, CNN FINANCIAL NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. And you know, Carol, that heightened terror alert definitely had something to do with the increase in online shopping. And you're right, we saw a nice increase in last week. What we saw was $960 -- $950 million spent online just last week. And that was up more than 40 percent from the same week a year ago. Some of the most popular categories for shopping online, sending flowers, sending gift certificates, basically because you can go online and get those sent the same day that you order them. What we are seeing overall, though, for the holiday season is the online shopping gains just not good enough to help the overall shopping season. The forecast is now for a 4 percent gain in retail sales this season year over year. That had been a 5.7 percent forecast, but they have lowered it, basically because of the heightened terror alert and because there were two big winter storms on weekends, especially in the northeast, and that hurt overall -- the overall retail picture. I want to tell you about one stock to watch today, which is Sara Lee. The ticker symbol is SLE. Today the company is expected to come out with some low carb breads for all of you Atkins followers out there. White and wheat bread, they'll have nine grams of carbs per slice. The traditional slice of bread has 15 carbs. And it's expected to be in the restaurants and stores this week. So if you are counting your carbs, Sara Lee has some new products for you -- Carol.</s>COSTELLO: Interesting. Sasha Salama reporting live from the Nasdaq market site. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com Million>
Online Retail Spending Up 43 Percent Last Week to $950 Million