Strung-Out Consumers, Desperate Retailers, Crummy Sales

Wolf Richter: Strung-Out Consumers, Desperate Retailers, Crummy Sales

By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Testosterone Pit.

During this festive time of the year, the whole world is intensely focused on American consumers, watching their every move under a digital microscope to parse if the universe is going to live or die. Retailers and the media joined forces to create hoopla and excitement and frenzy and the perception of once-in-a-lifetime deals. Stores opened on Thanksgiving, stayed open late at night, and opened early in the morning. And consumers dove right into this extravaganza.

Chaos, mayhem, melees, and stampedes ensued. Black Friday Death Count arrived, I don’t know how, at 1 death and 15 injuries that day, and 7 deaths and 90 injuries since 2006, from shootings – over parking space, obviously – stabbings, tramplings, collapses, fights, pepper sprayings, exhausted shoppers falling asleep at the wheel…. “Because only in America people trample each other for sales exactly one day after being thankful for what they already have,” is how a tweet explained that phenomenon.

The sacrifices of shoppers who paid the ultimate price, or almost did, will not be wasted. They did their patriotic duty and obeyed orders and went out there and, despite immense difficulties and bad weather, fought it out in the trenches, often mano-a-mano with other shoppers, to further our national goal of borrowing money to buy more baubles, devices, and rags made in distant countries and then re-exporting the detritus for recycling. The world economy is based on this. American consumers merely execute the plan.

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Despite Thanksgiving having been turned into a shopping day! Retailers are now discovering: it’s a zero-sum game, where the frontloading to Thursday cut sales for the rest of the weekend. Expenses were the only thing that went up. If inflation is added into the equation, the total decline for the weekend amounted to a gut-wrenching 4%!

It was the first drop in at least seven years! Even the catastrophic Thanksgiving weekend of 2009 was roughly flat. Instead of spending more money in less time, as they were supposed to, consumers are spending less money in more time. A toxic mix; many retailers get 40% of their annual revenues from the holiday shopping season. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/12/wolf-richter-strung-out-consumers-desperate-retailers-crummy-sales.html#i2l3At8vZGcQqYuB.99