Posted on 11/22/2009 11:47:01 AM PST by Chet 99
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US retailers are taking desperate measures to spark holiday sales in the face of what promises to be another troubled year-end shopping season.
Merchants are furiously working to ramp up consumer interest ahead of "Black Friday," on November 27, the day after the Thanksgiving Day holiday that marks the traditional kickoff of the holiday gift season.
Some are promising price cuts of 50 percent or more on some hot electronics, and planning for big events to bring out shoppers for big sales promotions.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Last year, I was shocked by the amount of empty shelves in the week before Christmas. It seemed clear that stores did not want to get stuck with a lot of unsold inventory, so they under-bought. This year, I think it will be much worse. Last minute shoppers may find very little available — and I don’t hold out much hope for interesting items in the post-Christmas sale season.
They are in for rough sledding this year.
Even my spendthrift brother and sister-in-law have cut up their credit cards.
If they really wanted to boost sales, they’d spread the cuts over more than a few hours.
Is saving %50 worth facing a pre-dawn mayhem? And why would I want to buy the item the next day, knowing that I was paying $50 too much?
I think Amazon is the only one who sells anything at Christmas anymore. Really, why go to a mall when you can order just about anything online and have it brought to your door. Maybe if these merchants stock something worth buying and quit attacking Christmas, the Salvation Army, etc. etc. they’d get somewhere.
Personal observation. Each year there is always a “Must Have” product like the X-Box, Furby, Guitar Hero, you get the picture. Is there a product like that this year? I haven’t noticed one but my kids are above “toy” age. I know a one item surge does not an economy make, but the draw to the stores just isn’t there. Myself, I have been laid off thanks to the economic recovery, so our Christmas this year will not include shopping.
I am spending very little this year, proabably about only 20% of what I would normally spend. Not hurting for money, just I am sick and tired of obama.
Happy people shop and buy gifts, happy employed people.
When you spread the wealth around instead of growing the pie, you get lots of people with a little money who aren't inclined to spend.
“The quality of spending this holiday season will still be dismal, however, when compared to Christmases past,” she said.
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I didn’t realize there was such a thing as the “quality of spending”. Volume or quantity of spending I can understand but what is quality of spending?
your soooooooo very very right and retailers should wake up and smell the coffe and place the blame directly on the WH
My family has agreed to tone it down this year, and we’ve been toning it down for the past few years. Christmas presents are mainly for kids, and tokens of affection among adults. One or two nice gifts that had some thought put into them make much more of an impression than a Pile O’ Stuff.
Over the past few years I’ve made bargain shopping my hobby. Not so much that I had to, although not having anything in your life teaches you to value it when you do have something. It was also that I was sick of being treated like an ATM by my state (Massachusetts). Not just in sales taxes but in rising costs by stores that are really just more taxes being passed on by them to me as the consumer.
I can find almost anything online at steep discounts with free shipping and mostly no sales tax. If you shop online enough you will almost get queasy at the thought of paying what a retail store is asking. And what I need to buy in a brick and mortar store, well, there’s tax-free New Hampshire.
I do miss the way department stores used to ‘do it up’ for Christmas with decorations and such...it used to awe me as a kid. They hardly even do that anymore (kind of hard to do it when you avoid the word ‘Christmas’ and anything religious at all costs in obeisance to obnoxious political correctness). But the meaning of Christmas is really about something much more important than shopping anyway...
Cosign to your post 9.
People are learning what I learned years agao. There are always sales. Miss one and another will be along soon.
People that get up in the middle of the night and sit outside a store....NUTS!!!
Insofar as electonics?
Well, we are going to purchase a good new radio, but we'd have to do that no matter what time of year it was.
Gifts will be practical, pragmatic, and only purchased if the sale price is right.
Quality Spending? It's like the difference between a quarter pound of high end extremely expensive freshly roasted coffee beans, or a three pound can of the generic ground coffee in the big box grocery center.
I suspect most Americans' motto this year is somewhere along the lines of, "Less is MORE."
Well, its working. I just stopped by Old Navy (intending to buy a single pair of jeans for my son) and ended up getting $105 worth of clothes. What I bought today would normally have cost me 2X as much—and that includes 2 pair of jeans I got for myself.
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