At my Walmart, Valentine’s Day arrived on December 26.
All stores have seasonal sections. It really just amounts to keeping the shelves full.
Only 27 days left until Valentines Day!
All retail is much worse than is being reported.
A friend in upstate NY told me that the annual craft show which is held for a month in a major mall was 86% down from previous years and that was just before Christmas.
If your inbox is like mine, the *sales* and *specials* have become a joke. For the past month, every retailer is “extending sales” and they also send *updates* 3 or more times a day. Retailers I have ordered from 2x in 8 years tell me I am a *favored* customer and they have a *Special* “just for you”.
I wonder if the candy wholesalers offered discounts for volume and the retailers took it and now are trying o increase sales by offering it earlier.
I sell wholesale. Every distributor wanted to order below minimums around Christmas. We stuck to our policies and all said they would wait to order mid-January. We’ll see what next week brings.
Everyone is tapped out or stretched. Even if they are still in the stock market and made money this year, they are paying commissions and taxes. Wealthy folks we know who were going to stay working for several more years, usually for spousal health insurance benefits, are now retiring in 2014. Best guess is they will save a lot on taxes and they just found out the health insurance benefits are less than they were hoping.
In my area, this is always a slow month, because property taxes are due 1/31. This year, add in that heating costs for December were about 20% higher than last year. As a wholesaler, I know no one wants inventory before the end of January because they will be taxed on it.
The administration and the progs are killing this country.
You have a walmart?