Not That I Have Anything Against Burl Ives, Specifically

So I'm at the mall last week with one of my kids.  I forget which one.  The tall one, I think.  We're in Old Navy buying him a couple of shirts, which is big intra-family news because new shirts are also clean shirts, and my son in a clean shirt clears by a mile the classic man-bites-dog definition of news.  Out of the ordinary, shall we say.  I'm leafing through the sweaters made of long underwear material and  I notice that the Old Navy sound track is Burl Ives singing, "Have a holly, jolly Christmas..."

You can insert your own pro forma bitching about the early arrival of the holidays here if you like.  Lord knows, I've been there.  I've always said that if it were up to me Christmas wouldn't start until the day after Thanksgiving.  The kick-off event would be that repulsive race Wal-Mart moms engage in every year.  You know the one: At 6 AM Wal-Mart throws the doors open and a buffalo herd of women in stretch pants trample each other to make sure that little Eustacia Jean gets whatever this year's hot toy might be.  Cover the official opening of the retail feeding frenzy season the way the nets cover the Rose Bowl Parade: With Cathy Lee and Bob Eubanks sitting above it all reading pre-scripted banter:

That's Mrs. Jethrine Prole right up front again this year.  She seems to have recovered nicely from last year's heartbreak.  She took a nasty fall when the elastic in her waistband snapped and she was de-pantsed before she could get ahold of a Tickle Me Spongebob...

Over the years I've resigned myself to the early arrival of Christmas, and have started tracking the season's inexorable march forward.  (This year's winner: A christmas decoration catalogue in August.)  I understand that the hard reality for retailers is that Christmas makes or breaks the year, and everyone's bonus depends on the holiday sales numbers.  I can't blame anybody for hitting it hard.

That said, I think we may have reached a point of diminishing returns, and Old Navy provides a shining example.   Someone needs to teach retailers the art of building over time in order to manipulate the audience's emotions.  You don't kill the bad guy in the first five minutes of the movie and expect the audience to stick around, and you don't put "Holly Jolly Christmas" on in early November and expect sales numbers to stay high for seven more weeks. 

You want to ramp-up; instead, Christmas has become a wall.  One day it's Halloween; the next day it's Christmas complete with snow and Santa and "Holly, Jolly Christmas."

I'm not making a moral argument here, and I'm not complaining about the early arrival of the holiday shopping season.  I'm making a purely practical argument: You can put in your Christmas displays in July, for all I care.  Set Santa up poolside in a Labor Day diarama if you think that's going to set the debit cards afire.  But from a strategic standpoint, shouldn't retailers hold a little something back for the last few days when shoppers need a boost?  If retail is war, shouldn't the mall marketeers listen to Clauswitz and protect some strategic reserve?

Of course they should, but they don't.  And there's no better example of it that "Holly, Jolly Christmas" immediately post-Halloween.

"Holly, Jolly Christmas" is the kind of stupid novelty song that, if you have any sense, you forget completely about immediately after the holiday.  It's a nice song, really.  A holly, jolly song, in fact.  But it's also completely disposable -- which is its great advatange.

When people's eyes are glazing over and credit card companies are running processing lags of thirty or forty minutes, that's the critical moment.  Customers, at that point, are on the verge of breaking.  They've got nothing left.  They're Notre Dame and they're behind and it's time for the retailers to give a rousing pep talk.  What are you going to do, coach, if you burned-off the win-one-for-the-Gipper speech in the first two minutes of the game?  I'll tell you: You're going to lose.

That's the moment when you need a bouncy, familiar, idiotic jingle like "Holly Jolly Christmas."  That's the moment when you want to see customers in the aisles perk up like deer hearing footsteps in the woods.  "What's that sound?  It's 'Holly, Jolly Christmas'!  I forgot all about that song!"  It puts a spring in their steps, keeping them going for another couple of hundred  bucks. 

Except that under current Christmas theory, "Holly, Jolly Christmas" has already been used up.  It's been through the retail Muzak rotation a couple of million times and everyone has built up an immunity to it.  Old Navy and the rest, when the crucial moment arrives, will reach down and find their bags of  tricks empty.  They'll have nothing to do but watch their customers wander out to their cars with headroom left on their credit cards.

Well, not quite nothing to do.  They can always cut prices, which pushes people toward shopping later in the season.  I know people -- I  am people -- who don't even think about shopping until margins are slashed in the last week of the season.  We can do that with confidence because it always happens, and it always happens because retailers lay in huge inventories so they don't run out of popular items, and because they shoot off all the other big guns long before the battle is really engaged, allowing everyone to shop themselves out in November.

Like, for rexample, "Holly Jolly Christmas."  You never thought of that as a "big gun" before, did you?  It is.  Or it could be.

Comments

[Kevin Hall]

Damn you Tom! Now I have that friggin song stuck in my head! Give me a call when you have a free evening and I'll buy you a frosty beverage. I'd love to catch up.