Tomorrow is forecast to be the hottest day of the year in the UK - maybe the hottest day on record. And yesterday my friend J pointed out, in a free local paper, the first Christmas ad of the year (caveat - that we have seen; please advise if you saw one earlier. Likewise Thanksgiving, Diwali, Hanukkah etc).
The Cowdray Arms invites you to book your Christmas Party now - free bottle of Prosecco for your table if you book before the end of August. £39.95 for 3 courses including tea and coffee.
FWIW, my business started placing our Christmas orders last month. In my field (and probably lots of others), we have to get holiday orders in 6 months early. Next month…before most people have even started thinking about Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas or the New Year, we have to start thinking about Valentine’s Day.
When I hear people talking about being annoyed that stores have Christmas merchandise on the floor on November 1st, I try to explain that it’s because it’s been sitting in their backroom for a week or two already. There’s no good reason to leave it in the backroom for another month wasting space and costing money. Especially since it’s harder to sell in December when your competitors have had theirs out for four weeks.
And if running ads gets people to keep you in mind, or even better, pre-order, it makes your live that much easier as you settle into December.
Haven’t you ever heard of Christmas in July? :rolleyes:
Bullshit. There’s no reason it needs to be in the backroom in mid (or even early) October. I get retail needs to be in front of the holiday but do you really need to rush it so much? Halloween is pushed aside for Chirstmas, as soon as that is over it’s time to push that aside for Valentine’s Day, then on the 15th it’s Easter candy being put out.
When the local supermarket starts putting out Halloween candy before Labor Day I end up not buying any candy from them. That’s probably better for me anyway.
You might not, but that’s you. Plenty of other people will be grab a few bags of candy and mentally check ‘get halloween candy’ so they don’t have to worry about it on October 30th".
Where should it be? The vendors require us to pre-book everything in July. When they get it in, they start shipping it.
When I worked retail (large drugstore chain) we started getting Christmas merchandise in August. We had to find a place to store it until November rolled around which wasn’t fun. We were tripping over the boxes for months.
I did see some Halloween candy for sale at Kroger last week. And I did get a catalog in the mail with Christmas stuff in it but it was a craft catalog so I’ll give them a pass. Gotta have time to make the stuff.
What’s the shelf life, is it even still before it’s ‘sell by’ months later?
Six weeks for Christmas, thee to four for every other holiday. That’s what it should be but I know that’ll never happen again because someone thinks they can make a buck by selling it earlier.
I like pumpkin beer. It used to be on sale in the fall, which is when wanted to drink it. Now it’s on sale from mid-July to early Sept. Good luck finding it after that. Then the Christmas beers are sold out by early Dec. I should not need to buy something & hold it in my house for weeks or months to use it at it’s appropriate date.
Actually, that sort of thing makes sense; those special Christmas dinners get fully booked up, so if you know you’ll be in town and you want to eat there, you might want to book early. I know that you need to make reservations for the company Christmas party early.
Candy? Like a really long time. I’d wager that most candy has a best before date that gives you at least a year and if you don’t let it get hot or frozen, will be fine long after that.
I wasn’t asking how early it should be on the floor, I asked where it should be, in response to your question that it shouldn’t be in my backroom months before Christmas.
Also, yeah, we all want to make a buck, but it’s also consumer driven. If consumers didn’t buy things the first day they were out, stores wouldn’t put them out even earlier the following year.
All beers come out way early. I’ve already started backing off on my beer orders since Oktoberfest beers start showing up at the end of July. Most of the distributors have them out by Mid August. I won’t buy any more Oktoberfest or Pumpkin beers (except for a few that sell really well) once we’re getting into the middle of September. I need them to run out and the Christmas beers are already in. As soon as december rolls around, I don’t buy anymore Christmas/holiday beers.
However, this is a bit different. For Pumpkin and Christmas beers and to a lesser extent Oktoberfest, the sales totally fall off the day after Christmas (luckily some people understand that Oktoberfest is a style, not a flavor). So I have to do my best to have as little of it left as possible.
There’s a bit more leeway with regular seasonal beers, but I’d still prefer not to have a summer shandy floating around when it starts snowing or Winter Warmer in Spring.
I think reservations are different. A restaurant may only be able to handle, for example, 100 reservations in a given night. If it’s a popular place, you’re going to want/need to do it early.
In Milwaukee we have a huge motorcycle rally every 5 years. A lot of the people that are in town for the week, will make reservations at a hotel for the next one or two rallies (so 5/10 years out) just to be sure they can get a spot. The Iron Horse hotel, IIRC, tends to be totally booked up for the next rally before the current one is done.
As a consumer, I don’t care whether it’s in your backroom, still at the manufacturer, or not even made yet as long as it’s not out on the sales floor. Are you high enough in the food chain (or do you work at a large chain store, where MN or AK dictates what you get & when) where you can tell your manufacturer not to ship to you so early?
Summer is only half over yet bathing suits are on clearance racks (& have been for weeks now, since at least 4th of July weekend) & fall clothes are hanging on the racks in department stores. If one rips a bathing suit, changes size or decides they need an extra one for their Aug vacation they’re almost screwed already, in the high season for that article of clothing.
I get you don’t want to be stuck with leftovers, but sell what is wanted/needed in the season where it is used.
That, right there, is what a lot of this comes down to. I can’t predict what people are going to want or need, I can only take an educated guess based on previous years.
If my store sold 500 Christmas widgets in 2017 and 800 in 2018 and both years I was out of them well before Christmas, I’ll order 1000 Christmas widgets this year. They’re going to show up when they show up and they’re going to be on the floor in November. I can’t risk having 600 of them left over in January because a small handful of people are annoyed, especially if I can sell all 1000 by putting them out early. You certainly don’t have to buy any, but unless everyone joins in with that sentiment, enough people will buy things early to make it worthwhile to take their money and get the product out the door. If there was some societal rule that everyone agreed to saying they refused to buy Christmas decorations until December 1st, that could change things, but I’m certainly not in any position to decline a sale.
I can certainly understand why you, a consumer, doesn’t care what’s in my backroom. But as a store, I do care, I have to care. It costs money to have that sitting around back there and that gets passed down to the consumer. You should look at it from another angle. No one is forcing you to buy anything before you want to, and the people that do start buying early help keep your prices down.
I don’t know what MN or AK is, but if you tell me, I can give you an answer.
And no, my store isn’t not nearly big enough to demand distributors cater to my whims, at least not at the level where I can force their hand. Sometimes we work out deals that benefit us both, but something like holiday purchases, no, not a lot we can do about that.
As I stated upthread, Thanksgiving used to be sacred. Then some B&M stores started opening to compete with online. Some of those chains have gone back to closing on that day as they find out that sales that day robbed sales over the weekend & they had additional expense of salary, etc. for having the store open an extra day. The minimal extra income, coupled with the ‘badwill’ from being open on the holiday wasn’t worth it. Operating in a vacuum, say the only Wal-mart in a small town with shitty internet connectivity, do you not think you’d sell all that in a shorter period of time? You can say you’re doing it to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ but, collectively, retailers are pushing holidays earlier & earlier, & IMHO it’s been pushed way too far.
the home locations of Target & Wal-mart. If you’re a store manager for one of them, you’re probably just a cog in the wheel; it’s different if you own your own store. I don’t know what size of a store/chain you’re in & whether merchandise decisions are yours or made at a higher level than you.
Oh Lordy - forgive me my obsession with this, but it drives me up the wall.
Hello from the UK, where “Seasonal” TV programming starts tomorrow, with a double bill of Xmas films on Channel 5 (yes, it’s a mainstream terrestrial channel):
I’m Not Ready For Christmas - Holly’s world changes when her niece sends a wish to Santa. The Trouble With Christmas - A woman falls in love with a town ripe for redevelopment. (This appears to be a Christmas film about a town called Christmas. If you know better than me, feel free to correct me. It’s not like I’m going to be watching it.)
If Christmas programming in early October isn’t enough to upset you - got your turkey yet? (I realise this isn’t an American thing, but run with it). The nation’s favourite cut-price supermarket started advertising turkey and all the trimmings (frozen) or other festive roasts yesterday, with the goodies available to buy from Oct 17th.
Apologies if these links don’t work outside the UK. But you’re probably better off without them anyway.
I’m a Mall Walker (yes, me and the other Old People).
The Christmas Candy Extravaganza Tooth Decay booth opened ages ago, but the true harbinger of Christmas is the Hickory Farms pop-up store, which had not appeared yet when I was there last Saturday. Maybe they will have the decency to wait until after Halloween? They will definitely not wait until after Thanksgiving.
Are you kidding? Turkeys at the holidays is definitely an American thing. Thanskgiving (third Thursday of November, unlike the Canadians) especially, but also at Christmas.
In the US, turkey for Thanksgiving is pretty much universal. For Christmas, it’s common enough to be unremarkable, but nor is it remarkable to serve something else: In particular, a lot of families do “party food” for Christmas.
And the one kind of store that should be allowed to sell anything Christmas this early is craft stores, because it might take some time to make the Christmas stuff in time. Other than that, just no.