Do you suffer from pre-mature celebration?

This weekend brought us many stories of a booming “Black Friday “and suggestions that surprisingly strong sales over the weekend may mean a great holiday season for retailers. Today’s “Cyber Monday” will very likely produce a solid double-digit gain over last year, further supporting the narrative that the consumer is back. I hope this is [...]

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Hype-y Holidays: The Mythology of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

The media hype around “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” is already at a fevered pitch–and the din will only grow louder over the next few days. But can we get real for a moment? To be sure, these are very large volume days. Black Friday sales will likely push $20 billion, and Cyber-Monday revenues are [...]

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Retail’s holiday “game of chicken”

By most accounts the holiday shopping season got off to a solid start with strong late November sales and a record Cyber Monday.  Though given the historically high level of discounting and rampant free shipping it was likely “profitless prosperity.” But why worry about little details such as actually making money. So now, with only [...]

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Holiday Hype Part II: The Unimportance of Cyber Monday

You would think that with all the hype around “Cyber Monday” it must represent a very significant percentage of holiday e-commerce sales. You’d be wrong. For perspective, here are the top on-line spending days of 2009 according to comScore: 1.   December 15 $913 million 2.   November 30 $887 million (last year’s “Cyber Monday”) [...]

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