Categories: OLD Media Moves

Don't overemphasize big Christmas shopping days

TheStreet.com media critic Marek Fuchs has some advice for business reporters getting ready to cover the Christmas shopping season: It’s been stretched out so long that individual days no longer have the same impact as before.

Fuchs wrote, “We saw this last year, remember? The Business Press Maven predicted a decent Christmas shopping season, and as each cutely named all defining day — from Black Friday to Last-Minute Thursday to the totally ridiculous Cyber Monday — passed with apparent disappointment, readers emailed me to crow about how wrong I had been. “But with the Christmas season stretched longer, these defined days (even the real ones) are increasingly irrelevant and surely not all defining. Anyhow, once we knew how the entire season went, I had to dance a celebratory gavotte on the graves of all those misperceptions.

“Let’s not make the same mistake as we go forward into the Christmas shopping season. Believe the consensus you are currently reading about how holiday shopping starts earlier. But realize that this excludes the possibility that any day in late November or early December holds the key to the season.

“And, please, if a shopping day sounds like it’s made up from whole cloth by some fathead at a keyboard, rest assured that it is.”

View Comments

Nan Connolly says:
October 11, 2007 at 9:41 am
Fuchs makes an excellent cautionary point about resisting retail marketing slang in stories, especially those that imply every last person in America is bustling around with shopping bags in December. In my old neighborhood 30 miles from Seattle, and here in Central Florida, I'm surrounded by a diverse array of faith traditions - Hindu, Buddist, Jewish and so on - whose followers don't celebrate Christmas. The days when "everyone" was portrayed as celebrating Christmas are long gone, and so much the better. While I don't begrudge JC Penney and the Gap etc. from wanting the biggest PR push of the year at the winter holidays, business journalists need not merely repeat their ginned-up predictions. After all, retailers have another important means of access to our valued readers and viewers - they can buy advertising. No-one turns to Scrooge, er...Craig's List, for gifts, decor and smoked turkey.