Do you remember when sales happened four times a year? When you had to actually wait until Boxing Day to score an item at a great price? It wasn't that long ago.
We've observed a recent, dramatic shift in the increasingly competitive retail landscape. Retailers have gone from a position of power, only needing to discount their wares to move inventory at the end of the season, to consumers demanding sale prices all the time. (When is the last time you paid full price for an item at the Gap? Why would you when a discount is delivered to your inbox nearly every week?)
In the U.S., Black Friday, the day after American Thanksgiving, typically heralds the beginning of the Christmas shopping season with massive retail sales. Confusingly, the Bay, Canada's oldest retailer, and many other Canadian retailers, are heavily advertising their Black Friday sales this year. This is particularly odd since we don't observe Thanksgiving today.
What's clear is that, even in Canada, large retailers have jumped on the sale bandwagon.
Sales drive traffic to stores, and consumers love a deal. So what's the problem?
The problem is that we've created a culture where there is no longer any value placed upon an item that is full price. Customers have been trained to never pay full price. Getting something 'for a steal' isn't unusual, it's expected.
But let's say you run a small business. And let's say that you charge for your product the price that is fair given what it costs you to deliver that product. You don't have an advertising budget, and you don't have widespread distribution. Like 98% of companies in Canada, you're a small biz that just doesn't have a lot of wiggle room on your price.
When your customers come to you looking for a deal, and you don't feel like you can afford to give it to them, it can create bad blood all around. Everybody loses.
As small businesses, the job falls on our shoulders to educate our customers about pricing. If we give away our products all the time, we just won't be in business to make those products in the future. As a customer, you're not a chump for paying full price. If you're dealing with a small business, the full price is probably also the fair price.
My daughter received the classic game of Guess Who? for her seventh birthday. It’s a two-person guessing game designed to eliminate characters based on their physical characteristics. Since that day two months ago, hundreds, without exaggeration, of games of Guess Who? have been played in my house. It has been played by all combinations of my children, and sometimes not by my own children. And the girls have devised all kinds of non-traditional ways to play the game too.
Early on, however, my girls ran into a problem. They figured out that if they chose to be a girl character (a natural choice give that they are girls), this would radically decrease their chances of winning the game. This is because there are 19 male characters and only 5 female characters.
Last week, even before we had celebrated Halloween, I noticed that Christmas had arrived in the land of retail: Holiday-themed lattes at Starbucks, festive paper plates at Loblaw’s, and plenty of décor at the Bay.
Look, I enjoy the merriment of the holiday season as much as the next girl. But this habit of ‘holiday creep,’ where retailers move dates up on the calendar in order to drive sales really irks me. (Is there anything more depressing than seeing ‘Back-to-School’ sales in early July??)
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