Archive for November, 2009

It’s the week before “Black Friday.”  My predictions for the stories you’ll see next week?   Headlines announcing that retailers are nervous about the holiday shopping season and how Black Friday will portend to a weak holiday season.

How do I know this? Because that’s what has been covered the past TEN YEARS.  You can read all about the five perennial bad stories of the holidays by downloading my free white paper with all the facts at http://www.retaildoc.com/holiday-sales/

My evidence about Black Friday can be found in these November Headlines:

Sources:

1 Retail Sales in October Up a Disappointing 2.9%, The New York Times, 11/3/00

2 Holiday Buyers Wary of Nation’s Malls, The Washington Times, 11/27/01

3 Retailers Bite Nails as Sales Cool, USA Today, 11/20/02

4 Retailers See Sales Rise in October, But Wary for Holiday, USA Today, 11/4/04

5 MC: Shopping to be Lighter Than Expected, American Banker, 11/21/06

6 Data Point to Weak Holiday Sales, The Wall Street Journal, 11/15/07

7 Retail Sales Slip, Signaling Cutback in Holiday Spending, The New York Times, 11/15/07

8 Retailers See a Broad Slowdown Ahead of Holidays, The New York Times, 11/7/08

What’s funny is most of us would look back at 2002, 4 and 6 as the “golden times” by today’s standard yet by the stories, you’d think each were the worst.

Why is it important to know most of the stories are regurgitated? Imagine about to get married and your family and friends kept bringing up predictions of divorce because they read about it.  What would that have done for your confidence in the biggest time of your life?

Likewise, these endless broad-stroke stories set retailers up for a rotten holiday which influences their buying, hiring and marketing.  It makes them feel they’ll have to “to something” and discount to hold on to market share. That is a recipe for disaster as they begin the New Year.

And it isn’t just the media covering this, it is the major retailers too quick to lower expectations so Wall Street lets them off the hook, it is the credit card companies, shopper traffic reporting companies – the works.  All trying to get in on the feeding frenzy.

Before you watch how this plays out over the next week,  tell your friends now so you can say, “Told you so.”  Don’t forget to get the full white paper about each of the five major stories reporting the negative of retail sales . It’s free and it might just provide some sanity in this rush to sensationalize and paint with a broad red brush.

Oh and a bit of background on the whole “Black Friday” obsession.

The day after Thanksgiving has long served as the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping season since the start of the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade back in 1924. However the term “Black Friday” applied to retail only began to appear in 1960 and 1970 Philadelphia media accounts as a term used by city police, cab and bus drivers to refer to the busiest shopping and traffic day in the city when the streets and department stores of downtown Philadelphia were mobbed by shoppers – giving the police and retailers plenty of crowd control headaches.

By the 1980s, an “urban legend” began circulating that “Black Friday” was the day that retailers move from “red ink” (losses) to “black ink” (profits). However, and while “Black Friday” is an important day for the bottom line of retailers, it should be noted that most big retailers earn a profit every quarter. Nevertheless, there are some retailers that are so heavily dependent upon “Black Friday” and the Christmas holiday season that this time of year may in fact erase all loses from the previous three quarters and account for all of the year’s profits.