This is what is great about baseball that can’t be replicated elsewhere:

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This month Amazon’s new tablet the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet go on-sale this month.  While both products are technically the house brand of competing retails, they’ll be widely available  in a variety of retail channels.  One would typically presume that a consumer interested in the Kindle Fire would just go to Amazon.com to make the purchase while someone interested in the Nook tablet would go to BN.com or a B&N store.

In fact, shoppers like to compare – even when they think they’ve made up their mind.  A series of new tablet offerings – both garning strong media buzz – is a positive for retailers. While it is always difficult for a retailer to make margin selling what is a akin to the house brand of their competitors, the introduction of several competing devices creates a catalyst for consumers to enter into stores and compare.  This will help drive traffic, potential sales of the devices, but even more important is sales of the higher-margin accessories. With the significant decline in physical media, several other elements are becoming traffic drivers.  Today’s hottest hardware devices are now traffic drives.  Confusion or multiple available selections within a category are also key traffic drivers.

My title is a bit deceiving – retail sales definitely do show strong seasonal trends driving by year-end holiday buying. As the chart makes evident, retail sales are very seasonal.  For GAFO, which represents stores that specialize in department store types of merchandise (furniture & home furnishings, electronics and appliances, clothing & accessories, sporting goods, hobby,
book, music, general merchandise, office supplies, stationery, and gift stores), December sales represent about 12 percent of the annual total retail sales and November and December combined represent about 21 percent of annual retail sales.

At the same time, consumer surveys suggest consumers are continuing to push purchasing later into the year.  In just the last few years an increasing number of consumers are reporting they are beginning their holiday shopping later in the  holiday season (and therefore later in the year).  This would seem to suggest that we would see a greater portion of annual retail sales represented by November and December.  As I recently wrote, consumers are increasingly delaying their purchasing in anticipation of deals, discounts, and bargains that materialize later in the holiday selling season (ie Black Friday). But when one looks at the contribution November and December sales make to annual retail sales the share for November and December doesn’t appear to be changing  – at least not according to the official statistics.

 

 

For the last 18 years, CEA has conducted and published a holiday outlook. This research has revealed that overtime consumers are starting (and likely ultimately finishing) their holiday shopping later in the year.  Over time fewer are starting their holiday shopping in September and October and more are beginning in November and December. I credit this shift to shoppers waiting on deals and other promotions. Certainly the growth of Black Friday contributes to this phenomenon.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported UPS is also expecting shopping to be pushed later into the shopping season.  To quote the WSJ report:

United Parcel Service Inc. forecast what it called a “solid” holiday shipping season Monday, saying volume during the hectic week before Christmas will be up 6.2%  from last year. It also said it will boost seasonal hiring 10% to 55,000 temporary employees.

The Atlanta-based company didn’t provide an overall forecast for the traditionally busy period between thanksgiving and Christmas, saying the peak shipping season has been shortened because consumers are increasingly shopping
online and delaying purchases until late in the year.

“Before the explosion of e-commerce, the holiday peak season stretched from Thanksgiving to Christmas, [but] now it’s been compressed to the last two weeks before Christmas,” the company said.

It forecast 120 million deliveries during the peak week, up from 113 million last year.

UPS also said its global delivery volume “will approach” 26 million packages on what it anticipates will be its busiest day of the year, Dec. 22.

The article also reported FedEx’s recent announcement that “it expects its package volume between the traditional Thanksgiving-to-Christmas peak shipping period to be up 12% from last year, and it forecast 17 million packages on its busiest day, up 10%.” It is clear the growth of promotions, the skittish nature of consumers in waiting for promotions, and the rise of ecommerce are all driving shopping later into the season.

Consequently this puts pressure on supply chains – notably on manufacturers and retailers.  Historically, retailers could judge the holiday season by examining the start of the holiday season.  It was early enough that they could then order additional merchandise as needed.  But now the sales are happening later so retailers aren’t receiving a good gauge of the season until it is largely too late to order additional merchandise.

Gigaom reported that a future Boxee Box upgrade will allow users to access live over-the-air TV programming.  I’m a big fan of Boxee and of the Boxee Box.  The ability to search across different video content services is a key element of what TV needs to be.  As I’ve written about in the past, universal search – if it can ever be delivered – is an important aspect of the future of TV.

Certainly OTA matters. Something like 40-60 percent of the TV programming US households watch still come from the channels available free over-the-air.  But with the OTA tuner dongle, users will still need to install a digital TV antenna and herein lies the hurdle.  OTA programming can be great uncompressed HD content – but the need to set-up the antenna is still a big (enough) hurdle from keeping many from relying solely on OTA and other Internet-delivered content. When the mass market can access “OTA” video programming across an Internet connection and not be beholden to an antenna, then will consumers truly start to move away from traditional paid TV services to other online delivered content.

It was announced yestereday that Richard Branson made a personal investment into the mobile payment technology Square.  I’ve recently been using square and absolutely love it.