Call it "Christmas creep." Holiday decorations are going up earlier in stores with each passing year, seasonal merchandise gets stocked on shelves soon after Halloween, and Christmas-related commercials are appearing on TV long before Santa Claus makes his way through Manhattan in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.
But is a longer Christmas season good for retailers? The phenomenon of an ever-earlier Christmas season is a boon to the people responsible for supply-chain management at retailers large and small, according to operations experts at Wharton. But Wharton marketing scholars and other analysts say an extended Christmas season is something of a mixed bag. It may hold advantages, disadvantages -- or even no advantages -- for store owners.
"Mini-arms Race"
Christmas creep, says Wharton marketing professor Stephen Hoch, has been a topic among consumers and retailers for some years now, much like complaints about the National Football League season extending into February and baseball's World Series being held so late in the fall that cold temperatures at game time have become the norm. "It's like a mini-arms race. The competition among retailers means nobody wants to be second. That moves the shopping season up a little bit more each and every year. Are consumers going to revolt against it? No. Will it get people in a holiday mood? No; people will get in the holiday mood during the holidays. Does it give retailers a chance to set displays up sooner? Sure. Does it make stores more crowded? Yes. Decorations and special displays tend to make stores cluttered and hard for shoppers to move around."
Hoch suggests that Christmas creep, and the 20% and 30% discounts associated with it, have become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Retailers gauge the success of the current selling season by using a metric called same-store sales -- comparing this year's figures with those from the same period in the same stores a year ago.
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