I was walking through the mall last week… okay I was hitting up the local Starbucks for the upteenth time… and I noticed that Nordstroms (a large and very successfully upscale department store on the West Coast) was having a huge Fall Fashion sale. I tried to get my mind around this but I couldn’t figure it out… it’s the end of July, it’s 95 degrees outside… and they are trying to sell heavy wool coats and long underware. What’s the deal?
I know I’m a guy, I don’t follow fashion much, and I don’t usually buy clothes three months in advance (strangely I buy things when I need them) but I really don’t get this at all. And to top it off, a few weeks earlier… we’re talking mid-July now… I went to look for a bathing suit. Forget it. The department stores stop selling those in March. Huh?
This is insane. I can understand them offering clothes for the upcoming season… hey somebody may want to buy an overcoat in June… but not selling the current season’s stuff seems ludicrous. And this trend seems to be getting worse every year. Pretty soon they will be selling Fall Fashions in Spring! Is rack space so precious they can’t ever sell current season merchandise any more? It’s very frustrating to me, and I think most guys. WARNING*/Beware of gross generalization/* But most women seem to be much more comfortable with this arrangement.
Are there any serious retail folks out there that can explain this phenomenon to me in terms I can understand? And don’t tell me the fashion industry in NY or Paris dictates what a store can sell on any given day… I just don’t believe it.
You might not buy clothes months in advance, but many people do. Most mothers want to get their kids’ “Back to School” shopping done early.
I’m like you, though, dolphinboy. I like to buy things when I need them. I think it’s irritating to go into a store looking for a pair of swim trunks only to find that they’re all gone and the summer clothes have been replaced by winter coats and such. Man, that’s a chafe.
I was going to start a pit rant about this very thing. Over the last few days, I’ve gone to three different sporting goods stores looking for a pair of swimming goggles. But they’ve packed away most of their swimming stuff to make room for hunting equipment. It’s July, for christsakes! It’s the middle of summer, people are still out there swimming! Why do stores do this?
I think the result will be more people buying off the Internet where they can stock a lot more stuff than a brick and morter can. That will drive some of the department stores out of business but I don’t feel sorry for them since they don’t seem to care much about what their customers want anyway…
Think how I feel . . . I work at a women’s lifestyle magazine; we just closed the September issue, are in the mdist of the October one and are laying out the November issue. So the halls are jammed with racks of winter clothing we are going to tell you you HAVE to wear or be shunned by the fashionistas next season . . . And I am editing Thanksgiving articles . . .
Okay Eve… then the question to you is why does “The Fashion Industry”, and I include magazines such as yours, push the upcoming season so hard? Is there really nothing else to write about? And what’s so wrong with wanting to buy a swimsuit in July?
Okay Eve… could you do all of us poor saps a favor and ask the “they” you refer to in your last post? This isn’t some random happenstance here… it’s a concerted effort by thousands of people to force us to buy things 3 months in advance.
And let’s say I join in the game and buy a new wool coat… in August… I don’t know about where you live but I won’t be needing it here in California until January or February. Am I suppose to hang it up in my closet and admire it every day for 5 months? Why on earth would I do that?
Offering back to school fashions a few months early makes perfect sense… not being able to find a bathing suit in Summer doesn’t. There has to be a reason!
Well, I’ll bite, although it may not be really helpful.
When I worked for a psychotic diva designer, we had to have each season’s collection done WAY in advance, because there was a time lag between the showroom, the retail orders, production, and delivery to the retail stores. So I understood why we had to be so far ahead, but not the stores themselves.
Apparently there is no good answer to this question except… that’s just the way it is. For whatever reason it was set up this way a long time ago and department stores, because they all do the same thing, force us to go along with the program. I give up trying to understand why it is so…
I think that this occurs mainly because most buyers, for whatever reason, like to shop this way. If there was a large demand for swimsuits at the middle/end of the summer, then swimsuits would be plentiful. Retail space is scarce, you can only put out there what’s selling.
