Yesterday, I went to Target because I needed to pick up a pair of slippers. Easy enough, I thought. I was wearing a down coat, snow boots, and came in liberally sprinkled with the heavy snow that was coming down. At that time, it was somewhere around 20 degrees F.
So, I eventually discovered that the slippers are a seasonal item. They have been replaced by “beach footwear.” I took a long look around, and asked the employee who filled me in on this, “Does it strike you as odd, speaking as a representative of Target, that you go from shovelling the snow away from the front door, to selling tank tops and sandals?” He agreed that it did, but said that they had to do what corporate told them to. I understand that, but Target is headquartered in Minnepolis, just across the river. They have the same weather there that we do in St. Paul.
What is the deal? I understand putting out St Patrick’s Day stuff now, so that they can have it on the shelves as long as possible and sell as much as possible before they take it down March 18. But people are still buying mittens and hats and slippers. (And why are slippers seasonal anyway?) Who in their right mind would actually take off the down coat and try on a halter top? (All the shoppers were still in their warm coats. Yes it’s indoors, but it is cold!)
Hello! It’s February! In Minnesota! What’s it like in retail land?
Sure, it’s twenty degrees there. But you’re missing a couple of big things here. 1) Target is a nationwide chain, and most of the nation isn’t quite like Assfreeze, MN. It’s been in the sixties every day this week here. People are thinking about their spring and summer wardrobes, and the retailers are already poised to take advantage of that. When opportunity knocks, you gotta be ready to answer the door and all that. It’s just good business. 2) No matter where you are, it’s pretty much the tail end of winter, and most folks have all the cold weather stuff they need already. People who needed sweaters, boots, coats, etc. bought them back when it was getting cold rather than freezing all winter. That sort of thing just isn’t going to move well, and retailers aren’t going to waste their time, money, and floor space stocking stuff that doesn’t move well.
OK, that makes a certain amount of logical sense. Where are you that it has been 60 degrees?
I was once trying to order some flowers from an 800 number. I wanted mums, but the operator told me they were winter flowers, and out of season. I told her that it was in the 20s and I was watching the snow come down, already a foot of accumulation and more on the way. Winter sounded about right to me. It turned out she was in Florida, which I thought explained a lot.
So do they average out the temperature for the whole country when they make these season changing decisions?
I used to work for a well-known corporation headquartered in St. Louis Park. They would send out display plans for the entire store based on store #7, located near HQ. It didn’t matter that my store was built differently from #7, there was going to be hell to pay if our merchandising didn’t match #7. My store was located in a college town, and our products were very popular amongst college kids. We were usually undersold by the competition, including a Target that was 100’ from the mall. Officially, according to HQ, our only competition was the other music store in the mall. I called this remote-control management, coming from clueless corporate wanks, and got tired of it and the biz pretty fast.
I did some work for Mervyn’s of California (like Target, it too is owned by Dayton-Hudson). I ran across a marketing map of the US which was color-coded by region. Apparently, each region would stock a different mix of products, according to whatever criteria the person doing the coloring was using. Mervyn’s caters to the same market as Target, but sells mostly soft goods (things made from fabric).
The regionization prevents them stocking heavy overcoats in L.A., for instance. I’m sure Target and other national chains do the same - otherwise, people in Miami would wonder why their neighborhood store was selling snow shovels.
Sidebar: from Levi Strauss & Co. ("Don’t call it Levi’s, yell the LS&CO lawyers): It seems folks in WI, MN buy larger size clothes than do people in SF - an interesting factoid. Seems that the folks in the upper midwest are more likely to be descended from Nordic types, and SF has a large population of Asians. Hence the clothing size varience.
Retail is competition. If Store A puts out their St. Patrick’s Day (for example) merchandise out two weeks before everybody discovers their Irish ancestry, then Store B takes note of this, and puts out THEIR Green Merchandise 2.5 to 3 weeks prior to SPD next year. Then, of course, the year after THAT, Store A retaliates by putting out their shamrocks and leprechauns at least a full month before St. Patrick’s Day. The reason being, most people don’t shop just one store, and when they hit a store selling seasonal merchandise for the first time, they’re likely to buy items if they will buy that season’s merchandise at all. Of course most Jews won’t be buying Christmas stuff, and most Christians won’t be buying stuff for Hannakuh, but you see what I’m saying. This leads to our modern atrocity, the Christmas merchandise put out before Halloween. The problem is, SOME people WILL buy that merchandise. Even if we don’t buy it when it’s first put out, we will remember that Store B had such-and-such available, so when we’re ready to buy, subconciously we expect to find the merchandise at Store B. The early shoppers will tend to buy more merchandise than the later shoppers, too, so the merchants will try to cater more to them
Or so the store owner explained it to me, when I asked why we weren’t selling bathing suits in July in Las Vegas.
Lynn’s explanation reminds me of the one I got when I asked the circulation director at work why the dating of puzzle magazines is so screwy. (I’m currently working on things with cover dates of Summer, June, July, which will go on sale in April and May). Apparently the belief is that the customer will buy the “freshest” issue, without regard to what the actual dates are. In other words, if you go into a store now, in February, and see cover dates of February, March, April, May, you’ll pick up the May issue, regardless of whether you’ve seen the other three issues or not. This originated in kind of an arms race with the other major publishers; they’d have their April issues out when we had our March issues out, so we’d have to move up our April issues too.
Interestingly enough, we’re doing more with volume numbers and issue numbers, and ignoring date designations altogether. I’ll have to ask someone about this next time I’m schmoozing with someone further up the food chain than I.
We moved to this house in september, and 'long about October noticed that we had a nice, thick layer of fallen leaves in our backyard, which it was likely time to start raking up. So, we march off to the local Target, and proceed to look for a rake. We don’t find one. I ask someone if they carry rakes, and he replied “No, ma’am… rakes are a seasonal item, so we aren’t carrying them right now.” I contemplated this for a moment, then turned to Mr. Armadillo and asked him what season would be more appropriate for stocking rakes than fall, you know, that season that’s happening right now? The one that’s causing all my leaves to fall down on the ground, and need to be raked up?
To make this even more ironic, we went to two other big warehouse chain type hardware store places in quest of a rake–both were completely sold out of rakes. One would imagine that should they adjust their seasonal stock accordingly, Target would have been doing a bustling trade in rakes that week.
We were, sadly, forced to buy our rake from the one store in town that still had them in stock… Wal-Mart
I hadn’t shopped there in years, and I was forcibly reminded why, several times before we reached the exit-doors. But they did have the rake we wanted, and were the only place in town that did.
Apparently, it is impossible to buy an umbrella stand in Seattle in November.
They only sell them in August. It doesn’t rain in August. It’s not like that many people use umbrellas anyway (I wanted one for knitting needles) so I can imagine them not being a high volume at any time of year.
But it doesn’t rain in August. I can’t imagine wanting to buy an umbrella in August, much less a stand with which to hold many umbrellas in August. However, in November (when it does rain, and we get mudslides and flooding), there are no umbrella stands to be found.
Also, here, it isn’t going to be summer until July. Though I hear their reasoning… when you walk through the mall, and half the people are wearing overcoats and heavy boots, it is insane that you can’t find anything but sandals and tank tops. I might think a month ahead (I can buy for summer in June, knowing that it’ll be 3 weeks before I can wear summer clothes) but 4 months out? Who buys clothes that early?
I wish I had a link, but James Lileks commented on this phenomenon a while back on his site. He decided Target must be on some alternate timeline, shifted forward a few months, and said he was always a little nervous that he’d walk in the store one day and see a display of canned food, radiation suits, and underground bunkers.
I had a similar experience recently. The air-conditioning at my office keeps it at a brisk temperature, which many people alleviate with space heaters in their offices. Recently, the one in my office blew a fuse, rendering it powerless. So off to Home Depot I go, to be informed that space heaters are a seasonal item, and thus they are not sold in January. WHAT!!?!??! I called around to a couple of other places, and the same story was everywhere. So are people supposed to just frickin’ freeze to death if their heater breaks in January or what? I think the only place I can get one now is by ordering online.
Just another reason the internet is my personal jesus.
This worked in my favor a couple of weeks ago. See, I’m going on vacation next week in Florida, and I wanted to replace my old bathing suit, which is not very flattering and is starting to get threadbare in places. I thought to myself “It’s the end of January! Nobody in their right mind is selling bathing suits yet!” But of course, the next time I went into Walmart, they had a really nice bikini on the rack.
I can’t believe I bought a bathing suit in early February.
I think it likely also has a lot to do with inventory control. Take your space heater issue. Sure, a couple of people might suddenly need a heater in Jan when they didn’t need one in Nov or Dec. However, once January passes and things start to warm up a bit, NOBODY will want another space heater until November comes around again.
You’ve got to weigh the possibility of getting $10 of profit on a sale vs. tying up both $100 of cash and space in your store on a product that might sit idle for 9 months.
Clothing availability is the same around this country! As soon as the 4th of July is over, all of the summer stuff (bathing suits, shorts, etc.) go on sale, and sweaters and coats move in. I found this very strange in Southern California, because the hottest weather of the year comes in July/SAugust/September.
Some retailers are bucking the trend…there is a chain here that sells beachwear into the fall. Of course,youare unlikely to sell a lot of bathing suits in mid-winter.
Almost all non-topical magazines follow this model. Lead time is usually about two months. For example, I have a fresh shipment of comics right here, and a quick survey shows that they almost all have April listed on their covers. Three or four are May covers.
Why is this done? I remember reading an explanation in a Richie Rich letter collumn about 20 years ago. The editor explained that having a two month lead on the cover listing ensured that the books would be left on magazine racks for a lot longer. This, of course, wasn’t true even at the time. For decades, it’s been done this way for the same reason that new model year cars come out in September; it doesn’t produce any benefit for the company doing it; they do it that way because that’s the way it’s done.
They don’t even try to pretend that post-dating extends rack display time or that the book will actually be on the racks during its display month. Christmas-themed issues tend to hit the racks in November, to ensure that they get the holiday audience. Checking the Christmas-themed issue of JSA (released in November), I find that the cover month is listed as January. I suspect holiday-themed crosswords, word-search, logic puzzles, etc. work the same way: released early, but post-dated.
It’s become nothing more than a dating convention; the January issue (that is, the issue that is published in January) of any given book will have March on it’s cover, but if the content is themed, it will be themed to February events, most likely Valentine’s day.
This might have made sense when comics and other magazines weren’t published on a rigorous monthly schedule, but really not even then. Comics are sold primarily by issue number (do puzzle book enthusuasts collect issues the way comic collectors do? I suspect not); when a new issue comes out, the older ones are either relegated to the back or stored to be sold as back issues, usually at above cover price.
Topical magazines such as news or pop-culture magazines that are published weekly tend to have an exact cover date, which is followed fairly rigidly.
After CCL posted, I felt like I was just out of step with the universe.
