Halloween decorations are now appearing in a store near you. (It’s not an apparition.) It must be early August. Of course, all items related to summer — from outdoor furniture to swimsuits — were gone from store shelves in early July. Our weird consumer society dictates this calendar — you can’t buy things when you want to use them. Summer isn’t for purchasing warm-weather clothes — it’s time to buy back-to-school outfits. Even if you don’t go to school.
Late winter and early spring are for buying summer stuff, but summer doesn’t qualify as its own shopping season, the way “back to school” does. Or the way “The Holidays” do. (That’s the Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas-Hanukkah-New Year’s-Valentine’s Day-Easter spectrum…)
Retail Dive, a news website for the retail industry, reports that back-to-school spending this year is expected to be “healthy” but “not as healthy” as last year. Part of the “problem” of predicting on how the back-to-school shopping season will go, is that not all parents are on the same calendar as the retail stores.
“Kids are more likely to need new clothes because they grow, but research has found that parents are happy to wait for sales and the end of summer or beginning of fall for that,” according to the Retail Dive. So even though research shows parents would rather wait (for the very sensible reason that their kids will keep growing over the summer) before buying new schools clothes, retailers stick with the old calendar model, and then worry about why they haven’t sold more over the summer.
Noting the “not as healthy” numbers predicted for this summer, the Retail Dive author notes, “These numbers, and retailers’ experience with this shopping event, show how volatile and hard-to-pin down back-to-school shopping is.”
Yes, the volatile back-to-school shopping market. Does every industry try to create a little drama just drum up some interest?
Because certainly this kind of summary wouldn’t provide for an interesting headline.
“As seen over the last 13 years, spending on ‘back to school’ has consistently fluctuated based on children’s needs each year, and it’s unlikely most families would need to restock and replenish apparel, electronics and supplies every year,” National Retail Federation president and CEO Matthew Shay said.
Wow. Back-to-school shopping fluctuates based on children’s needs. Crazy.
For now, it’s still summer, regardless of what’s on the stores shelves, or the retail calendar. So try to hang on to the season, even as pre-season football looms, even if it means replacing your swimsuit with a Halloween costume version. Even if it means putting on holiday-stuff blinders when you enter a store.
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