CHRISTMAS PREDICTION

I write this on the day before Black Friday (which some people call Thanksgiving). I work at Target. In fact, I will be there tomorrow morning at 7:00am greeting the happy shoppers.

I have no insider knowledge of Target or the retail world. I am a grunt. In fact, my job title is “Cockroach.” However, my sense of the upcoming retail shopping season is that it will suck. I am predicting an extremely weak Christmas for the Targets and Best Buys and WalMarts and Kohl's of the world.

This feeling grows out of impressions only; there is nothing I can point to that even qualifies as “evidence.” However, there are a lot of little things that lead me here. Sales of high-end gourmet prepared foods seem to me to have become rather soft lately. Instead of the delicately seasoned jerk chicken breast in cryovac, people have been choosing the basic, vastly-cheaper raw chicken breast they have to season and prepare themselves. The organic milk (that costs 30% more than regular milk), doesn't seem to move as fast as it used to. The continuing push to up the ante on Black Friday shopping (Target opens at 6:00pm on Thanksgiving this year), suggests desperation rather than intelligent merchandising. I just don't see anything encouraging in the department-store/big-box world at the moment.

Copyright2014Michael Kubacki