Have you noticed how retail seems to move from holiday to holiday lately? There was "Back to School", Labor Day and then immediately Halloween paraphenalia starting appearing in the stores. This was the beginning of September! I noticed it when I walked into one of our local home improvement stores. There it was - Halloween stuff in the most prominent "grab 'em when they enter" section of the store. I had a momentary dislocation in time. Did I somehow miss an entire month? Was it really October and I had forgotten September?

No - I hadn't. It was indeed the beginning of September and I wasn't seeing things. It really brought my attention to this phenomena of stringing the holidays together with no gap in between.

I suppose one could think of it as a curious form of promotion. First, it's always a holiday. So I suppose one ought to feel festive. Next, because it's a holiday, there's a SALE! (Not surprising.) So on top of feeling festive, you can save money! More reason to feel festive! (So now we are feeling doubly festive!) (Do we lose festive-ness if we are festive all the time?)

From one perspective, this detracts from the holiday. After all, aren't holidays supposed to be special? (This is why they are holidays). They aren't supposed to go on for weeks on end. Perhaps the solution would be to celebrate a weekday like Thursday. It would be great! We could call it Thursday Day. On Monday we take out the Thursday Day decorations and on Friday, we put them away. Lazy people would be allowed to leave them out all the time.)

We could have special Thursday Day sales and promotions! And the best part is that if someone missed a Thursday Day - there would be another one the next week!!

Nonsense aside, I understand the motivation to attempt to sell as much merchandise as possible. Possibly it works for decorations. After all, can you ever have too many Halloween decorations? (What would Martha Stewart say?) But let's hope you don't need more than one Halloween costume. And I sure hope you didn't get that pumpkin at the beginning of September!

I guess you could take all this and file it under the heading of "merchandising". But there is a larger picture here about what one might call the "cultural impact" of retail. If this seems like a real jump from "continuous holiday" - it isn't. I did a double take when I saw the Halloween merchandise and it got me to thinking about other ways retail could be impacting the culture.

The idea of merchandising is to maximize your turn. And to do that, you don't stock things that don't sell; you stock things that do sell. So, as a buyer, you would avoid what you might think of as "fringe" inventory. As a result, the inventory is comprised of the "safe" and "normal" items. This has a tremendous cultural impact. It can literally shape the view of the customer as to what is acceptable and unacceptable.

Of course, in the beginning, it was about what is acceptable, needed and wanted by the area. As an example, the grocery store here stocks a prepackaged cactus. Everyone here (except me) knows what this cactus is, how to cook it, etc. The first time my wife and I saw the cactus it was "are they serious?". Well, they are and it's a popular item. (Apparently the prepackaged one has the spines or spikes or whatever those are already removed so it's a lot faster and easier to cook and eat than preparing one from scratch. What's amazing is that someone figured out that you can eat this stuff in the first place.)

So you start with that but as time goes by and high-voltage merchandising is applied, the direction can change where the inventory is shaping the view of the customer. Add in the unconscious bias of the buyer and kaboom - you can have some really interesting things going on.

Come to think of it, duh - you can already see this all over the world - how American culture has infiltrated almost every other country on earth. Sadly, we didn't do that with superior products. We did it with McDonalds and KFC.

Malcolm