Maybe you remember the article in Forbes from December 3, “Economists say depressed spending could persist for several years amid stubbornly high unemployment.” Or as recently as December 14 in a USA Today article, “Only 35% of consumers surveyed over the weekend said they would shop in the week after Christmas, according to survey questions posed by America’s Research Group on behalf of Reuters.  Last year, 38% said they planned to shop after Dec. 25. Over the past decade, 48% to 55% typically said they planned to shop in that week, America’s Research founder Britt Beemer said.”

Source: Wall Street Journal

Yet in the light of day? Oh, gee most retailers had increases in December.  For example, Bed Bath & Beyond Same-store sales rose 7.3%, margins rose to 41.1% from 38.9%.

It wasn’t just the new darling of the media the Dollar stores that increased – even Neiman and Nordstom – hardly the “value” brands of discounting.  While reports of only electronics having increases and apparel the worst performers for December, the strongest growth came from apparel chains that cater to both adults and teenagers.  Who knew?

Let the pundits go crazy taking shots again at these figures saying they, “Don’t matter.”  They do. Get ready for a comeback, not to 2005-7 levels but to those who want them, the customers are out there. Shopping. Luxury. Premium.

Go get ‘em!

To get ready for the comeback, pre-order the new book from Wiley  the Retail Doctor’s Guide to Growing Your Business

• First, the event was short but no lingering affects. Roads are open. If you are a Main Street or downtown location, make sure everything is clean and free of snow, ice and slop – it has to look inviting as ever these next few days.
• While it may have been painful to not be open your full hours, it is a level playing field; it was painful for your customers to not be able to complete their holiday shopping. You both need each other.
• Now more than ever customers will be harried, hurried and possibly harpy.  They won’t have as much time to shop around so make sure to get “Their List” and see how many names you can help them cross off.
• Consider using the hours you didn’t pay employees this weekend, to stay open a bit later or open a bit earlier the next few days to help ease shopper anxiety. Update social media with what you are doing as well.
• Start any seasonal clearance sale one day earlier and make it more substantial – you don’t want any left after this Thursday.
• Remember a lot of people held off shopping as they always do when Thanksgiving comes late and were caught off-guard that this was the last weekend before Christmas. Now with one less day, they might be upset so remind your crew to empathize with customers and get “Their List.”
• Remember guys are the ones you’ll see more of so read my post how to sell to them
• You’re welcoming them to your home- remember that. If anything, the demands for an exceptional experience have been upped because they have less options to shop around.  When they do, get their contact information so the next disaster you can keep more of your loyal customers updated on what you’re doing to help them get their shopping accomplished.

Now is not the time to try to discount your regular merchandise or try to come up with a new promotion – it’s too late for that. You are selling convenience in the next few days so add-on to every sale; if you offer gift wrapping (even for a charge) make sure customers know, if you have a liberal return policy make sure customers know and whatever you do – get “Their List.”

As each day gets closer to 6pm Christmas Eve the malls thin out from these types and you begin to notice more and more men – especially Christmas Eve when the malls are practically fueled by testosterone.  Men can be the easiest to wait on this week because we just want to be a hero. Here are a few tips (no matter what sex of a salesperson you are) to help you sell to us this week.

Realize this about your male customers:

-       We are not that price driven. We may “say” we are but remember, you’re basically dealing with a boy discovering your merchandise for the first time.
-       We often show how much love we have for the person we are buying for by the price tag or size of the gift we choose; whether that’s a toy, jewelry or clothing.
-       Its almost like we are treating ourselves when we splurge on someone else so don’t try to limit us.
-       Above all, we hate shopping, its not a thrill – its a chore. Help us by getting us to laugh or at least smile when we deal with you so we can acknowledge we want your help.

How to treat us:

-       Don’t leave us alone – we’ll walk.
-       Don’t follow us around or you’ll spook us; check-in every few minutes by pointing something out about what we’re looking at.
-       If you wrap, let us know that up front – it makes a difference.
-       Acknowledge your return policies right away – make it safe for us to buy.
-       If we trust you and pick something out ask us, “Who else is on your list?” We only want to do this chore once.
-       Figuratively take us by the hand if we’ve never been in this type of store before whether its lingerie, cameras or jewelry. Give us options; don’t expect us to know what we want.
-       If we can’t decide between a couple items, suggest we purchase the best item and return it if we change our mind before giving; that way we’ll at least have something. Remind us that otherwise we’ll have to return to the chore of the mall again and worse,  the item might be gone.

What to show us?

-       Big, bright,or cool.
-       The closer it gets to Christmas, the more likely we are to splurge.
-       Instead of a gift card, suggest an outfit or item of equal value so the giftee has something to unwrap that looks like you tried to get something just for them.

What not to do:

-       If you’re an apparel store, don’t make a big deal if we don’t know the size of our wife, girlfriend, buddy or child.  Instead ask us to point out someone in the store about their size. Remind us it can all be returned.
-       Ask for our budget. If you allow us to limit ourselves, you’ll dumb-down our choices and you’ll lose out.

If you realize that men shopping at the holidays have different needs, it won’t matter what her size is; he can still be a hero on Christmas.  He won’t have to say, “I just got this a few hours ago.” He can still win.

The Los Angeles Times this afternoon summed it up, “The government’s report came as a surprise but retail sales rose 1.3 percent last month, after a 1.1 percent October gain, the Commerce Department said Friday. It was the biggest advance since sales jumped 2.4 percent in August, and more than double the 0.6 percent increase economists had expected”.

Look for the media to pick this up and run the, “Well, it doesn’t mean anything or the numbers are skewed” they’ll have to find a way to spin it badly.

That sense of wonder was immortalized in the classic holiday movie, A Christmas Story as Ralphie and his brother window shop at Higbees department store in Cleveland, Ohio.

Where was the “big deal” then? Where was the rush to discount? Weren’t people struggling in the early 60′s?

According to www.recession.org, “The Early 1960s recession was yet another chapter in the modern economic cycle that has shown its ugly side so many times to the U.S. This recession was characterized by, once again, astronomically high unemployment rates, incredibly high inflation, and a bad Gross National Product rating.

Yet wonder still lived at Christmas.  Childhood fantasies were embraced. It was about finding the perfect gift.

Contrast that to news that Black Friday, while not a washout, wasn’t that great according to Bloomberg.com. What was the news? People were out shopping for “deals.

The National Retail Federations’ President and CEO reinforced the perception that all anyone wants is a deal in her press release yesterday, “Shoppers proved this weekend that they were willing to open their wallets for a bargain, heading out to take advantage of great deals on less expensive items like toys, small appliances and winter clothes.”

That’s what retail is devolving down to the “deal,” “the bargain,” “the door-buster.” What magic is there to sell that? What experience for the gift-giver?

And more importantly, where is the profit for the retailer?

Yes the big boxes can discount items like 100 toys for $10 but is that a discount? Haven’t they deflated the price to the customer?  If the game that should retail for $24 because it cost $12 now is perceived as a $10 item, isn’t the real cost now $10?  If you’re like Wal-Mart you can buy the stuff by the containerful and make something on it but what has it done to the value of the product?  It has deflated the price; perhaps permanently.

If you are a retailer carrying anything that can be reduced to below your cost I suggest you inform your suppliers you’ll no longer carry it.  It won’t hurt them right now but as the bigger mass merchants continue to play hardball with them, eventually they too won’t be able to make a profit.  Then what will they do?

I don’t want to live in a world where the hotel rooms I have to choose from are dictated by hotels.com, or a flight that makes me have two stops because air carriers can only fill up the planes with cheap deals from Priceline and dropped the direct routes or the cashmere sweater is coarse because the finer stuff won’t be a “deal” on overstock.com. In short  that everything devolves into a commodity.

I purchased holiday lights the other day from a mass merchant. A couple bulbs were broken when I got home and as I went to remove them found they were about 1/2 as thick as they used to be, they were like spun sugar.

Have the holidays become, “We saved 60% and got free shipping”- not “Grandma I looked everywhere to find the right scarf to match your favorite outfit.  Is America trying to show how “smart” they are and being duped? I wonder…

Higbees as it might be in 2009

If the only story anyone can tell is how much they saved, regardless of whether it is a good product or will do the job they want, or be a great gift – shame on the retailers that continue to stoke the easy fires the media are fanning.

That means they were off by 30%!!!

The article went on to say, “The corrections may cause some head-scratching and hand-wringing in newsrooms, at fair-lending groups and in legislative hearing rooms, where the CoreLogic data has been widely cited as an indicator of the severity of the mortgage meltdown. Testimony to Congress, for example, may have been overstated.”

Do you know what this does to consumer confidence? What it has done to businesses looking to try to get a handle on demand and inventory?

I’m not saying to take a Pollyanna approach to this, of course there are deep troubles but the breathless anticipation of bad news is ruining the entire attitude of the country; whether you are on the left, right or center.

Take all retail holiday sales news with a grain of salt over the next five weeks.  Just like the mortgage data that were overly focused on the negative, it isn’t going to be pretty but it pretty well isn’t going to be accurate either.

Fight for your customers by focusing on them, not the news hounds looking to make holiday retail sales into the next American Idol skirmish.

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.