Merry Christmas??

The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas has traditionally been retail’s sweet spot. The dismally named but eagerly awaited Black Friday shopping phenomenon was, of course, named for the point on the calendar when red ink turns black. But this year is going to be different.

In fact, it’s been changing for a couple of years now. In 2014, Black Friday retail spending fell for the first time, 11 percent over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend that year, the National Retail Federation reported. Last year’s big sales period was slightly better, up 1.7 percent for brick-and-mortar retail (and 13.4 percent for online stores but that’s a different column), with 2016’s retail fortunes expected to be about the same, predicts an eMarketer study highlighting data from the 2015 holiday sales season.

This year, a number of major retailers were getting out in front of the closing-on-T-Day trend. CBL & Associates, which oversees dozens of malls nationwide, announced in October that it’s shutting down its shopping centers for Thanksgiving, re-opening the next morning at 6 a.m. According to NBC News, a list of major retailers staying shut on Thanksgiving this year includes the 262 locations nationwide of Guitar Center. (Which has still eluded the predictions of its own special Grinch, Eric Garland, who just after last Christmas reminded us that, “…musical instruments are a terrible business to be in. Constantly shrinking margin, shifting consumer tastes, working with musicians in a business context,” though he concluded that, “…for those of us who love it, we couldn’t care less.”)

Changing Times

But if there’s finally some durable cultural pushback against an ever-earlier start to the year-end sales season, it’s coming at a time when retail in general has been having a slog of it. Retail has seen a stop-and-start year, but overall growth has been below one percent. Job numbers have increased and wages are slowly moving upward, a good omen for 2017, but this all still puts tremendous pressure on Christmas as the big retail payday. Retailers of all kinds have to be wary of how they present themselves during the holiday weeks. For instance, a study, reported in Psychology Today last year and based on an earlier experiment looking at the influence of Christmas musics suggests that holiday music (music!) can actually work against sales. “Compared to… listening to pop songs, consumers who heard Christmas music provided lower evaluations of the store on every dimension, including their overall impression of the store, the quality of its merchandise, and even their likelihood of visiting the store when it opened,” the study noted.

— When we feel pressured by others to think or act a certain way — as we might when stores pressure us to get in the holiday spirit — we become motivated to reassert our freedom by doing the exact opposite —

How that dynamic might play out in a music store is a meta type of question worthy of Bill Murray, but it underscores the fact that, in the wake of the Great Recession and its seemingly unending echoes – checked your Wells Fargo account(s) lately? – consumers are sensitive to feeling manipulated. As the Psychology Today article concluded, “…when we feel pressured by others to think or act a certain way – as we might when stores pressure us to get in the holiday spirit – we become motivated to reassert our freedom by doing the exact opposite. Psychologists call it reactance, and it’s a phenomenon that explains why pushy salesmen and micromanaging bosses are universally reviled. As humans, we desire the experience of autonomy in our lives, and when that autonomy feels restricted, we instinctively (and often unconsciously) look for ways of reclaiming our independence.”

Strategies

MI retailers have developed their own holiday sales strategies. Doug Ponier, of Ponier Music in the Atlanta area, had his own Black Friday epiphany some years ago. “I’m all for keeping Thanksgiving being a holiday to close up shop and spend the day with family,” he tells us, but add, “You wanna know the funny thing about Black Friday from the little guys perspective? The first few years it was like ‘Wow! this is gonna be great! We’re gonna be swamped!’ The reality is, everyone goes to the mall and Target and the big stores to get the big deals.” Ponier says he quickly lined up his Black Friday strategy with the rest of the world’s, scheduling significant price reductions and using email and social- media to amplify them.

Rick Santos, owner of Rick’s Music World in suburban Boston, uses an education angle to add a differentiating wrinkle, holding an annual Student Sale Black Friday event as a private sale just for its students and their parents. Some elements of that event are then extended to the general public after the holiday weekend. “We started this event because we noticed that on Black Friday, most customers would just go to the big box stores, and we had to figure out a way to get them to us,” he says. “This was a way to do it.”

Holidays bring out the best and the worst, in people and in institutions. But the disruptions in retail in recent years can also be a useful opportunity to reevaluate how to approach them.