Here it is, mid-September and I’ve seen my first Christmas commercial on television, this one for Summit Hill artificial Christmas trees. Has anyone seen any Christmas commercials earlier than this?
What, are you reigniting the War on Christmas already?
Stranger
My neighbors in Austin would hang up their Christmas lights by mid-October.
I have, but I ignored it and don’t remember what it was for.
Stores have Christmas stuff for sale for at least a week. I’m like, what about Halloween??
PS did you know they are making inflatable Halloween decorations, like the Christmas ones? And orange light strings?
Christmas trees and decorations are nearly always the first Christmas commercials, maybe they take longer to ship? I saw another kind of Xmas commercial two weeks ago, still in August, but I don’t remember what it was for, I blocked it out of my mind.
It’s going to be an anomalous Christmas-retail season. Donny-boy has seen to that.
I believe Costco has been putting their Christmas aisles up by August 1 for a number of years–nothing to do with tariffs. But word is that for all retailers, virtually all Christmas-related items will cost THEM multiples of what they used to cost.
So I suppose it’s smart for the commercials to try to motivate buyers to get their stuff early. Later on those trees may not be available at all. (Or it may be a case of: do you want a tree, OR a house to put it in….you can’t afford both.)
The craft store Hobby Lobby is a major Christmas retailer. They usually have their trees up for sale about now and the supply & variety of them dwindles quickly by the end of October. There are still some to be had as late as 1 Dec, but it’s the dregs.
For as long as I’ve been alive, they start in August. Always. Consider yourself lucky that it took this long.
Since we’ve covered XMAS, let me air my peeve: summer products, pool toys, umbrellas, fun outdoor things, patio furniture, etc seem to go away on Labor Day. But in Arizona, that’s getting to be the time you start using those things. But do retailers acknowledge that we’re different? Keep those things in the store longer? NO! They treat us like we’re Green Bay and it’s going to snow next week.
If it makes you feel any better, we in Florida get the same treatment. I’d blame it on Target’s HQ being in Minneapolis, but all national big boxes are that way.
If they’re smart enough to not ship us snowblowers, how come they’re too stupid to keep shipping us BBQs & pool toys?
I’ve thought about creating a general retailer called “All summer all the time”. With stores only in the southern tier of states.
It’s all about logistics. It, in general, doesn’t make sense to store and maintain inventory for just a couple of regions. You might think you know better but you don’t. That said, I’d be surprised if you can’t get anything you want on Amazon at any time.
By that logic, since half the country never needs winter coats, Target shouldn’t sell them anywhere anytime.
There is a chicken and egg problem that customers in the warm-winter zone have been conditioned to accept that they have to buy seasonal merch according to the northeast’s schedule of seasons. So they unhappily stock up in their wrong time of year and the retailers duly see demand crater in the right time of the year.
As you say, Amazon has been / will fix that.
Come on. They clearly sell enough of them to make it worth it. Again, they know better than you do what is overall the best use of their warehouse real estate and shipping. Their profits are insane. They know what they are doing.
I used to drink more beer in Oct than any other month. That was because I’m a baseball fan; with (multiple) playoff games on every night, having just two or three over the course of a three hour game isn’t a lot but doing that most nights it adds up. Other times of the year I’d go thru a case every two to three months but Oct was two cases in the month. That second case purchased was always Buffalo Bill’s pumpkin beer, back when they were about the only pumpkin beer made. Now, just about every one & their uncle makes pumpkin beers & your lucky to get one by mid-Sept. No, I don’t want to buy a fall beer in the dog days of summer.
I needed a new bathing suit a couple of years ago, the week after July 4th Macy’s had them in the clearance section already, so before the middle of summer when lots of people go on vacation & discover they need a new suit they’re already gone.
I get retailers rushing the season because they’d theoretically get more sales but it boggles my mind that they’re basically a season ahead & have already cleared out what people want when they want it.
They haven’t cleared out what they want when they want it in general. Their massive amount of data and experience shows that. Nearly everyone has their bathing suit already and they don’t want a bin full of suits languishing for the convenience of the occasional latecomer. They are experts at this. You are not.
Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence.
Let’s not get carried away with the Genius of American Capitalism. Companies make bad decisions and go bankrupt all the time. How well are Sears, KMart, Radio Shack, Toys R Us, Circuit City (shall I go on?) doing now by knowing “better” than me?
Give it a rest with the insults.
Sorry. This is an age old thing that actually does work. Companies go out of business all the time for various reasons and the discussion here isn’t one of them. Why those places went out of business is off topic.
Also, stating the objective fact that they are experts and we aren’t is nothing close to an insult. What a silly claim to make.
And I just realized that this is the Pit, dipshit.
Let me dumb it way down for you.
A store has a bin of swimsuits. At some point they realize that barely any of them are being sold whereas the bin of Halloween trinkets next to it is constantly being stocked. And this happens every year.
Should they
A: Keep the swimsuits on the floor in order to accommodate the one person every other day who still needs one despite the season being almost over?
B: Stock the stuff that is actually selling?
Show your work.
Trust me, no one hates the inundation of xmas more than I do. I also am aware of the obvious realities of commerce. This isn’t vulture capitalism, replacing higher paid experts with clerks or poorly preparing for internet sales. This is something that has actually worked for over a century and easily testable.
Thanks. dipshit. Let me dumb it down for you.
People in climates not controlled by cold-weather HQs (there are a lot of us) would likely buy more summer stuff if it were available. But we’re not given the choice because self-appointed experts such as yourself think they know everything. So we get winter clothes in Target in Sept in Arizona, where it is still in the 100s. What company are you CEO of, pray tell?
You have no fucking idea what is or is not selling out here. Or more importantly, what would sell if we could get it, if “experts” such as yourself would check the local markets.
So go take your smug self righteousness pretending to be intelligence and fuck yourself with it.
ETA: @hajario two posts up, and ignoring the present unpleasantness …
In general I support the logic of your POV despite my comments to the contrary upthread. But …
Back in Ye Olde Darke Ages of the 1970s I was involved in building some of the first Point of Sale (“POS”) and inventory tracking systems. Know what was actually selling was a revolution for retail management decision making. But it contained a huge blind spot.
They had lots of information on what was a) in stock and b) got sold. They had zero information on what was a) out of stock and b) would have sold, but the customer found an empty shelf instead. Or worse yet, found there wasn’t even shelf space for the [whatevers]; that was last month.
Having worked with retail management back then, they were essentially blind to the idea that the second or third category existed. The data they got was so bright and shiny and clear that it blinded them to the rest of the story lurking in the shadows. One of the inevitable consequences was a narrowing of product on the shelves.
Every B&M store has the challenge that the total variety of merchandise available in their category is vastly more than fits in their physical store. It’s even worse with clothes than other goods due to gendering, sizing, colors, and seasonality. So they can’t possibly stock one of everything they could sell; they have to pick a subset.
If they stay in business, they’ve evidently picked a subset that works adequately for their profit needs. But that does not imply they’re even close to optimizing what they could make. Nor does it imply that they are servicing all their customers, even the niche ones.
E-commerce has much greater warehouse capacity at much lower cost than a B&M store of any kind, so can afford to drive farther into the longish tail of saleable merch.
As a person who’s always suffered from noticing the seasons late, and someone who’s always been an outlier in physical size and shape, and who’s lived most of his life in places whose seasons don’t match the US northeast, for me e-commerce has been a boon precisely because they can afford to stock the stuff my local B&M retailers refuse to. e.g. I can get a wide variety of swimsuits from Amazon now, even though Target here, a half-mile from year-round tourist beaches has zero.