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If it’s August, it must be Christmas

Retailers push key shopping season ever earlier

By JEFF GAMMAGE
Philadelphia Inquirer
8/27/2006

It’s that special time of year again, when the first plush Santas, singing snow men and blown-glass Christmas ornaments begin to appear on store shelves.

You know. August.

What, you find it hard to muster yuletide spirit when you’re wearing a bathing suit?

Well, too bad.

At T.J. Maxx in Norristown, Pa., 2-foot-tall Santa figurines are already watching over a clutch of silver stocking-hangers, wooden-soldier nutcrackers and glittery tabletop trees. A few doors down, at the Dollar Tree, Frosty snow globes wait near the cash registers, not far from a selection of red-and-green ornaments.

At the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., a full-size Christmas tree is up and shining. Below its boughs, a toy Santa blows a saxophone, though it’s hard to hear his version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” while a nearby mechanical snowman is crooning “Jingle Bells.”

“It’s a retail mentality that you need to be first out of the gate, and people keep making the race longer and longer,” said William Cody, managing director of the Baker Retailing Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Labor Day, Columbus Day and Halloween, much less Thanksgiving, are now mere speed bumps on the highway to Christmas, folded into the 115-day month of Septoctnocember.

Researchers call it “Christmas creep.” That’s shorthand for the ever-backward march of the holiday retail season.

“It burns me up,” said Carter Lee, who is raising two daughters with her husband, Peter Maas, in Haddonfield, N.J. “It makes me want to go the other way. It makes me not want to buy anything.”

It’s not that malls are decked in garlands. If last year is a gauge, that won’t happen until Nov. 1, followed three weeks later by the arrival Santa and his crew. It’s that Christmas accoutrement are being set out while people are still slapping mosquitoes.

Hallmark stores have offered ornaments for weeks – puppies peeking from woolen mittens and Eskimos fishing from ice floes. Some Hallmarks are displaying collectible Byers’ Choice cloth-and-clay carolers.

“It’s over the top,” said Claire Daniels, of Springfield, Pa. “I would never, ever, positively never buy a Christmas item in September or August. On principle.”

The pitch for other holidays comes early, too. Halloween candy has been in grocery stores for weeks, raising the question of why anyone would want to serve, much less eat, a three-month-old Snickers bar.

But experts say the Christmas season starts earliest because it’s crucial to retailers.

In 2004, shopping malls took in $227.8 billion – 28 percent of their annual sales – in November and December, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. If a retailer can boost its take by getting customers in the holiday mood earlier, it’s worth it.

The question is whether the jump-start results in increased sales – in which case Rudolph may someday appear arm and arm with the Easter Bunny – or whether it only spreads the same dollars over a longer period. No one has a definitive answer.

“To the extent that you, the retailer, are there, and your competitor isn’t, you may grab a few extra dollars,” said Stephen Hoch, chair of the marketing department at Wharton.

The danger, he said, isn’t just in turning off consumers, but in becoming a prisoner to that promotion. One way retail sales are measured is year against year. If going early brought in extra dollars last year, a store is almost forced to go out as early, or earlier, this year.

Cracker Barrel put up Christmas displays on Aug. 1. Terry Maxwell, senior vice president of retail of the Tennessee-based restaurant-store chain, compared them to the previews before a movie, a way to offer “just a little hint of the coming season.”

He wouldn’t disclose figures, but he said Cracker Barrel has found that having Christmas items out in summer generates additional purchases, not just early ones.

“We’re doing quite a bit better than what we anticipated,” Maxwell said.

Analyst Stephanie Hoff, who follows big retailers such as Target, Wal-Mart and Macy’s for the investment firm Edward Jones, said the economy has forced stores to speak up early.

Last year Wal-Mart accelerated its start, to early November from late November, and other chains followed. They saw their lower-income customers being battered by rising gasoline prices and home-heating costs, Hoff said, and sought to “capture some spending” before folks were tapped out.

This year those stores will probably do the same, she said. And others will, too.

So what’s that? You don’t want to think about winter yet? You’d like to wait until the back-to-school sales are over?

Sorry. Get out your parka and pass the eggnog. There are only 120 shopping days left until Christmas.

This is really kind of sad. And here I worrying that I might be getting into Halloween too early. (I think I have officially dubbed my Jedi costume as my official Halloween costume.) /sigh/ It’s all about money, I guess.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Up to Cape Cod, where no manatee has gone before

By Warren Richey

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. – A Florida manatee is making history this summer with a long-distance swim that has startled fishermen, boaters, and beachgoers as far north as Cape Cod and has sparked a deepening mystery as large as the Atlantic coast.

Ten-foot-long, 1,000-pound sea cows are common in many parts of Florida. The marine mammals are known to roam throughout the state’s coastal areas, migrating to warmer water during cold snaps. But what would possess a manatee to undertake a 1,200-mile journey northward to the very edge of water warm enough to sustain its life?

Scientists don’t know. But they are investigating whether the manatee may be the same animal that made a similar trip 11 years ago.

If that is the case, “Chessie” has just extended his prior distance record of a northward swim by a Florida manatee by nearly 50 miles.

Researchers with the Sirenia Project of the US Geological Survey say they are hoping that the manatee seen recently near Falmouth on Cape Cod and Warwick, R.I., is the same manatee they tracked in 1995. Similar manatee sightings were reported earlier this month in the Hudson River near New York City.

“At this point I can’t say it’s him,” says Cathy Beck, a manatee researcher who maintains photographs of 2,000 of Florida’s estimated 3,000 manatees. Researchers can identify individual manatees by the pattern of scars left from collisions with boat propellers.

Ms. Beck made a tentative identification of Chessie from a television film clip shot on Sunday by NBC 10 in Providence, R.I. The 90-second news story shows the manatee drinking fresh water from a drainage pipe at a marina in Warwick.

“That looks like Chessie’s tail,” Beck said, watching the video for the first time. But after more detailed examination, she says she’s not so sure: “We just don’t have enough information to confirm the identification one way or the other.”

Chessie made it to Point Judith, R.I., in mid-August 1995 before encountering cold seas and heavy waves. The feat attracted international attention and raised awareness about the plight of endangered manatees.

Scientists had attached a tracking device to Chessie and monitored most of his 1995 trip. But the manatee has not been seen since 2001. “It is a wonder of nature that we have an individual who can make a trip that far north,” says Jim Reid, who tracked Chessie in 1995 and is monitoring the current odyssey.

Researchers aren’t discounting that more than one manatee may be touring the Northeast this summer. In 1998, they tracked a different manatee to eastern Long Island. But they say it’s possible that all the sightings this summer are of the same animal. “Cape Cod, that is a new record,” Mr. Reid says.

Manatees dine on sea grass and other aquatic plants. Restoration of the coastal environment in the Northeast has progressed to the point where a traveling sea cow could easily move from the manatee equivalent of one giant salad bar to another. They generally eat more than 100 pounds of vegetation a day and can travel 20 to 30 miles per day.

The primary limiting factor, scientists say, is cold water. Manatees prefer warm temperatures and cannot survive in water colder than 68 degrees.

Chessie got his name in 1994 when he lingered a little too long in the Chesapeake Bay. By October, researchers were worried that he wouldn’t be able to make it far enough south to avoid the approaching cold weather. A rescue team captured the manatee and flew him by US Coast Guard plane to Florida. He was released near the Kennedy Space Center after being fitted with a radio tracking device.

Reid followed Chessie’s travels south to Fort Lauderdale for the winter. Then he watched as Chessie headed north the next summer, back to the Chesapeake and eventually up to Rhode Island.

After turning south in mid-August, the radio tracking device broke free near New Haven, Conn. But sightings of Chessie continued in Virginia in late September and off Jacksonville, Fla., in mid-November.

Despite all the study, no one is sure why a manatee would make such a trip.

Some suggest that global warming has prompted him to seek out new areas. Others say he may be looking for female companionship. But others think he may just be a Magellan of manatees.

“There is a very good likelihood this is Chessie, and he is doing what he does,” says Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club, a Florida-based conservation group. “If nothing else, he is a great ambassador for his species.

I don’t know what disturbs me most about this story. The fact that the manatees are coming or that there are human’s who are taking their side.