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It’s just about shopping season! Last year, 19.2% of all retail sales were holiday sales – the stuff outside of food, gasoline, and other consumables that took place in the 28 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. That’s a total of $597B. This year, there’s one more day in that period and retailers hope for a decent increase.
Will this be a good holiday season that finally shakes off the blues that have plagued retail for the last six years? We’re about to find out.
A store can’t make a profit if it isn’t open, can it? On one very special day of the year, however, it may be much more profitable to stay closed. That special day is Thanksgiving, a sacred holiday that unites families and many traditions of this great Promised Land of North America.
How is that possible? Because the backlash against being open ahead of “Black Friday” is growing and more stores are not just staying closed but announcing their plans proudly. It’s becoming a great selling point that may help them boost sales in the weeks after – and perhaps put an end to the horrible encroachment on Thanksgiving without a single law being passed.
How ya doin’? It might be a simple question from an old friend you haven’t seen in a while, or maybe it’s someone closer who is worried about you and trying not to be obvious about it. But if you’re in the business of gauging consumer confidence, it’s a very serious question. And every month two different groups ask the question of 500 to 3,000 people just to see how we, the consumers of the US, are doin’.
The answer overall is that for all the asking and telling it’s amazingly hard to tell. Both the Conference Board and the University of Michigan / Reuters groups that do the surveys found October and November to be big downers, but the latter tells us there was a big rebound in early December. It’s difficult to say why, so the professionals that have to explain it are scrambling. Like so many important indicators there is both good news and bad. Let’s try to sort it out.
Black Friday. It’s worth $59B in sales this year, if you believe the projections. More importantly, it’s a financial and cultural reference point, the day when the Holiday Shopping Season officially starts.
But Black Friday is really a state of mind.
The psychology of the day is what matters most, as the excitement and crowds fueled by a small number of loss leaders gets people to spend far more than they otherwise should on other not-so-great deals in the stores. That’s how shoppers are manipulated by a system that sees them as nothing more than pawns to be used up on a game where the take on one day is really just a way of keeping score.
The September Jobs report finally came out after being delayed by the shutdown. Any way you look at it, a longer delay would have been better. According to the official Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures, the economy only added 148k jobs in September.
But there’s a lot more to it this time around lurking behind the scenes. The markets largely shrugged off the bad news and most of the reporting on the event was dismissive. It’s almost as though the anticipation was bigger than the event – like a disappointing Christmas (whoops! Can’t say that ‘round here!). Is it possible that financial reporting is starting to wake up?
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 