'The Year That Was'… So Far
By Steve Smith -- TWICE, 12/22/2003
Any media outlet, be it a news program or special, monthly or weekly magazine, Web site or daily newspaper that goes in for one of those "The Year That Was" special reports usually has deadlines of early December.
Just as inevitably there are news stories that break in December, after those deadlines have come and gone, that may change the year. Just think what scrambling editors and reporters who closed their "Year That Was" specials on, oh let's say Saturday, Dec. 13, just 24 hours before Saddam Hussein was trapped and captured in his hole in Iraq.
It is with this proviso that TWICE presents its annual retail retrospective in our last issue of the year, Dec. 22. Outside events did effect business, such as the war in Iraq, a lackluster economy and SARS, among other maladies. I won't recite the chapter and verse all of the significant events that occurred during 2003 at retail and to retailers, but some do stick out.
For instance, Circuit City's decision to end its commission sales system and fire 10 percent of its salespeople. While the industry saw it as purely a cost-saving measure, the company said it was training its sales associates a lot better via the Internet, so its effect would be minimal. (One unintended benefit for plenty of its competitors, especially local independents, is that they picked up a lot of these veteran sales associates.)
The Wiz met its demise this year, ironically just a year or so before true "plug-and-play" digital cable boxes and TVs would reach the market. That development was the reason Cablevision Systems, a major New York City metro area cable company, bought the local chain several years ago. But no matter how hard Cablevision tried to change The Wiz' old cutthroat image with consumers, it couldn't.
The weird end to the saga was that The Wiz name was put up for bid and, in a move that made many scratch their heads, there was a battle to win the rights to it. Originally former 6th Ave. Electronics CEO Leon Temiz won the auction, but the U.S. Bankruptcy Court overturned it to get more cash. P.C. Richard & Son took the rights with a $1.6 million big and said it would open a few Wiz stores and a web site under the same name. Go figure.
And talk about "convergence," how about Gateway? The chain, which coined the term "disruptive" pricing when it entered the plasma-TV market during 2002, entered the CE market with a vengeance this year. The chain retrofitted its stores nationwide and having around 40 percent of its product mix in the CE column by the end of this month.
All that being said even our own version of "The Year That Was" report is incomplete. The final verdict on the 2003 Holiday selling season is still up in the air. As we reported in our previous issue, Dec. 8, "Black Friday" was a busy one for CE retailers, but highly promotional. Profitable flat screen TVs were in short supply. In the Northeast and East Coast part or all of the two weekends after Thanksgiving were stormy ones, which could have hurt sales.
It could be a late-breaking season for retailers and consumers may be in a more festive mood, ironically helped along by Saddam's capture, the Stock Market climbing above 10,000 again, and reports that many companies are interested in adding payroll. As they say on TV, "stay tuned," because our first issue of the year, our special Consumer Electronic Show issue on January 8, will have our first report on how the holidays treated the industry. Until then, when our TWICE goes to Las Vegas to cover CES and publish the TWICE CES Daily (our tenth anniversary of being the official daily of the show by the way) we at TWICE wish you a happy holiday season and New Year. (Oh, and in the meantime, check out www.twice.com for late breaking news.)
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