I received the Jan CTT magazine towards the end of Nov so I was thumbing through it checking out the Christmas adds. I was very surprised that Lionel or MTH did not have Christmas themed add but on the backcover was a Williams by Bachmann Christmas themed add. The Williams add shows a young boy sitting in front of the Christmas tree holding a Canadian Pacific F-3 with the rest of the passenger set plus empty Williams Trains boxes stacked around him. A terrific picture for the season which gets the Holiday message out. To be fair MTH did run an add for their Tinplate Hiawatha set, it would have been much more appealing if they had went down the same path as Williams with a Holiday themed add.
Bill T.
If you add up all the ads in the January issue that feature a Christmas theme, you have a sum total of 1.
That's one of the quirks of the magazine business. Kinda like model years for automobiles, but not as wacky. The January issue might be in your hands in November but the December issue was in your hands the previous month. (obviously LOL)
Having worked 16+ years in retail told me that the holiday season starts in late June or early July when the live trees are cut at the tree farms!
Becky
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
Becky I agree with you,
For the first part of the last fifteen years I, also, worked for a retail store and for the Christmas season they usually started decorating in September.
One year they actually started to decorate in the middle of July, which seemed odd to us employees, but there was a method to their madness, which we never did figure out.
Merry Christmas and a Healthy and Happy New Year,
Ralph
Oh that's easy. It's seasonal merchandise. When the patio furniture and barbecue grills stop selling, you switch to Christmas goods. It's retail logic. Memorial Day is usually the cut-off point for summer goods. After that date the warehouses are all switched over to holiday product. (So if you're looking for that new BBQ grill buy it by the end of May.)
I remember when we started pushing farther and farther back into the summer months with the Christmas items and society rebelled. That's when big box discounters went to having a big "back to campus" section with mini refrigerators, computer desks and futons along side the notebooks, protractors and pencils you usually see during the back to school season. As an alternative, some chains started buying vast quantities of plastic totes and filled their shelves with those for 2 months to keep the place from looking vacant.
However retail logic and real world logic collide where Christmas is concerned. I never heard one complaint when I was out on the salesfloor at Builder's Square, Hills or Ames putting patio sets together at the end of December. But the moans and groans and the it's not even Halloween yet's run rampant when you try to put a tree together during the second week of October. But you know what? The people who moan the loudest are the ones who go up and down every aisle while you're trying to put out Christmas merchandise and look at everything. Conversely, nobody even gives you a sideways glance when your setting up grill accessories. And I live in Cleveland, Ohio. We get winter!
In the end I came up with this hypothesis: It's never too early for Christmas stuff to be out on display, even before Labor Day. What it is too early for is reminding people of how much money they're going to spend during the Christmas season.
Retail slave: 1988-2004
Becky,
You know what you are talking about.
I found out more about the retail world by working in it for a while longer and working at the company's headquarters building.
That's how I learned more about the retail planing aspect and then I understood the early Christmas preparation of that past July.
One Thanksgiving day a particular store opened, that was a no no then, now it's common practice, as evident of this past Thanksgiving Day and 'Black- In The Money-Friday.'
Then, again planing and preparation talk, while those who don't walk!
Yeah but that's just a cover-up. "Black Friday" was a term coined by salesfloor people in reference to the evil of the day. Like "Black Thursday" or "Black Monday" during the stock market crashes. It was just damage control.
It sounds better when it refers to in the 'Black' ink, for better profits. Actually, as you point out, it's more like; "Bad Day At Black Rock!!!!!"
Or, we better work our buns off to sell merchandise in order to bring in the profits!!!
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