I don’t know if the appropriate movie reference is Groundhog Day or 50 First Dates. I guess it depends on whether your taste in Saturday Night Live alumni runs to Bill Murray or Adam Sandler.
But it seems that every year we approach the holiday shopping season as if we’d never been there before. Breathlessly, we watch the phenomenon of midnight door busters, interview the crowds at Walmart and Toys “R” Us, measure and compare those sales figures – first weekend, first day, first hour – and astonish ourselves because there’s something called Cyber Monday that is changing all the rules.
“That’s right, woodchuckers, it’s Groundhog Day.”
“It’s still just once a year, isn’t it?”
So this year, because midnight on Friday morning is just too after-the-fact, tons of retailers opened their doors on Thursday evening, luring overstuffed consumers away from their TV sets. (That’s OK, the nighttime football game wasn’t worth watching, was it, Jets fans?)
While, perhaps for the first time in media history, commentators’ dominant word was “l-tryptophan,” the sleep-inducing amino acid turkeys contain as final revenge for the holiday that they alone do not give thanks for.
And so, after all those videos were edited and all those sales numbers were crunched, we find that store visits on the Black Friday after Thanksgiving rose 3.5 percent from last year, but sales actually decreased 1.8 percent. Which forced the National Retail Federation to reassure – somebody? – that “Black Friday is certainly not dead.” Thanks, NRF, I know we were all concerned about hurting the feelings of that day of the week that has kept retailers so hopeful for so many years – and has also kept college kids intoxicated.
What if Friday sulks and refuses to play next year? Get ready, Saturday.
After watching all this stuff play out for nearly 20 years now, I think the only number that really matters is the last one. As of midnight, December 25, when the last store door closes and Santa’s in the sky, were sales better than last year? Or not? Did retailers make their holiday goals? Or not?
Then I guess we can analyze all those numbers. Which categories sold well? Which retailers are really in trouble? Is the economy perky? Or still jerky?
So many questions, of course. Is it all just a zero sum game, with the same dollars that are spent on Black Thursday/Friday simply diverted from sales later on? We’ve been here before: all hyped up by opening weekend sales and then deflated by those final figures that come out in cold, bleak, post-holiday January.
Of course, this is the longest possible holiday shopping season, with Thanksgiving falling on the earliest fourth Thursday of November. So will that drive extra sales? Or will Santa just waste all that frequent flier mileage?