By: Dale M. King
Oh, the weather outside is frightful. Yeah, frightfully hot and humid.
I’ve noticed that weather like this seems to impact everyone except marketing people. It may be 90 degrees outside, but someone with marketing savvy is thinking it’s time to carve your Jack O’Lantern, cook your Thanksgiving turkey, whip up some Hanukkah goodies, trim your Christmas tree and make plans for New Year’s Eve.
Yes, if you haven’t noticed by now, the stores are already filled with holiday merchandise – from dollar outlets to the big department stores. It’s barely October, but you can find everything from fake pumpkins to jingle bells at your neighborhood shops.
It seems that retailers, aware of the weak dollar, high unemployment rate and general malaise about running up big tallies on credit cards, has hit potential shoppers with holiday ideas when they least expect it, hoping to cash in before the shoppers run out of cash.
This seems to be a trend that began at least a decade ago – or more. Someone looking to move a large inventory of holiday paraphernalia was sitting around saying, “Why do I have to wait until the end of November to unload this stuff? Why don’t I just put it on the shelves around…oh, maybe July?”
Each year, this holiday infiltration begins with a trickle during the dog days of summer. When the sale of hot weather items begins to wind down, things like plastic haunted house signs, witches-on-broomsticks-patterned pillows, orange and black toys and things like that begin to show up.
I remember seeing a stuffed witch toy in a store about a month ago. And that was weird, I thought, since it was a dog toy. As far as I know – and I will check with him on this – my dog has no awareness of holidays.
Well, it didn’t end there. By Labor Day, even big stores like Costco had holiday displays galore. Just this past weekend, my wife and I went to the local Costco and saw lighted trees, decorative snowmen and other holiday finery. It reminded me of someone I recently heard on the radio who admitted that he went to Costco to get something totally unrelated to the holidays. He said he was so enamored with the festive decorations that he ended up buying two boxes of holiday cards.
I imagine that’s what the store owners want us to do. Start shopping now – don’t wait. Whatever you’re looking for may not be here tomorrow.
Even the dollar stores are catering to the upcoming holidays. You walk in, only to wade through the plastic pumpkins and witch silhouettes before you reach the red stockings and the $1-a-box Christmas cards. Of course, stores are also selling Hanukkah items and I think I saw New Year’s cards in at least one store.
By now, you probably expect me to blame this on living in Florida, then tell you how much better it was in New England which has something unknown in the Sunshine State – seasons. No, the early appearance of holiday items is a national trend that has brought us other shop-shop-shop enticements like Black Friday, 24-hour holiday shopping and people waiting in long lines to get into Wal-Mart or Target at 2 a.m. (Actually, somewhere in the back of my mind is a memory of going into Kmart on Thanksgiving Day – and it was open. And that goes back to the days when I lived up north.)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about the early appearance of holiday items in stores. It actually helps me to get into the seasonal mood. And apparently, this is proliferating. There is, for example, at least one person who lives in this same development who already has a plastic pumpkin on his lawn that says Happy Halloween.
I guess I won’t really get into the spirit until radio stations begin playing Christmas carols 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I expect that to start a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving.
‘Tis the season, you know!