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Christmas
Season underway
earlier every year
Yesterday I took my wife to Sherman on a grocery shopping trip. At the front
door I was surprised to see a guy ringing a bell and hanging around
a Salvation Army pot, trying to make eye contact with everyone
entering the store to lay a guilt trip on them. In the lobby there
was a poster announcing that old Santa Claus would be there next
weekend. Inside the store, the speakers were playing Christmas music
and decorations were festooned all over the place. To make sure I
hadn’t lost my mind, I banged my head against the wall a couple of
times and checked the date on my watch. Sure enough, it was exactly
a week before Thanksgiving. While I don’t pay a lot of attention to
things like this since I’m not the primary shopper, I’m certain that
the Christmas shopping season didn’t start before Thanksgiving the
last I remember.
This
just in via Channel 12 News. As I write this, Santa Claus has
just arrived at Midway Mall in Sherman on an ATV! As he’s being
interviewed by the weatherman and I’m shocked to learn that the
jolly old elf has a Texas accent. The question I wish he’d ask is
what he is doing here 35 days before Christmas.
I admit to
being an old cynic, but hey—you can’t convince me that any of this
has the slightest thing to do with the Christmas spirit. It’s
certain to me that it has everything to do with the Spirit of
Ka`ching Ka`ching. It’s a well known fact that merchants make up to
50% of their years’ profit during the Christmas season.
To find out
if indeed the Christmas selling mania has come early, I did some
reading on the subject and found there is actually a term for
it--“Christmas creep.” An article by Stephen Hock, a Marketing
Professor from the Wharton School (of Business) at the Univ. of
Pennsylvania says: “…The competition among retailers means nobody
wants to be second. That moves the shopping season up a little bit
more each and every year. Are consumers going to revolt against it?
No. Will it get people in a holiday mood? No; people will get in the
holiday mood during the holidays.” So it isn’t that shoppers are
demanding an earlier Christmas season, but rather because merchants
are competing with other merchants and also comparing their early
sales with similar sales they made in past years.
The sales
numbers end up on the nightly news throughout the Christmas season
and are offered up as the domestic economy’s condition. I have my
doubts as to the accuracy of this kind of prognostication, but they
seldom consult me.
Do they
sell that much more by extending the season? Most of us buy things
for about the same number of people every year. Once I’ve got
something for my wife, daughter, son-in-law and granddaughters, I’m
done. Whether I do it in November or on Christmas Eve, I’m not going
to spend any more time or money no matter when the Christmas items
appear on the shelves. For retailers, the extended season is a
gamble. While they hope consumers will buy sooner and buy more, no
such fact has been established.
Had I been
in the stores, I would have noticed that retailers brought out their
Christmas decorations when they put away the Halloween stuff. This
afternoon I noticed that the City of Whitesboro had Main Street
decorated. My wife told me that Fort Worth had theirs up last week.
How long will it be before Christmas season starts the day after
Labor Day—or the 4th of July? There has to be a limit to
how far Christmas can creep.
In the
meantime, I’m going to dedicate this week to being thankful and
eating lots of turkey and all that goes with it. Hopefully,
Thanksgiving preparations will keep my wife out of the stores at
least until “Black Friday.”
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