Tales Of Retailers, Dock Workers
By Steve Smith -- TWICE, 12/9/2002
Thanksgiving weekend, and Black Friday, have come and gone and from the very early, tentative and general retail reports, there will be a holiday shopping season. How joyful it will be for retailers, and how profitable, are still questions that can't be answered with a strong degree of certainty, but if the first big shopping weekend was any indication the month should not be one of complete gloom and doom.
If you've read or seen many of the retail reports in the consumer and business media in the past week or so you've heard that consumers were out shopping as soon as the Thanksgiving dinner dishes were cleaned, whisking to early Black Friday morning sales. People were on line in front of many retailers to be the first in at 5 a.m. to start buying.
According to plenty of well-known retail research companies, shopping for the Thanksgiving weekend was up double-digits for all areas of the country. There was plenty of store traffic. Consumers were scooping up DVDs and DVD players by the handfuls. (We heard of one $39 DVD deck Black Friday promo gone awry, with a specialty chain running out of the designated model and having to sell name-brand units for the rest of the day to honor their guarantee, costing the store thousands.) While Wal-Mart's $1.43 billion Black Friday sales day was not all in CE products, it was a 14 percent gain over last year and a new record for the chain.
But the experts put in some cautionary notes to all this positive activity, and if anything, it seems logical. A strong weekend, even a Thanksgiving weekend, cannot overcome dreary sales for the past couple of months. Many consumers did seem to just follow the "SALE" sign at many stores. And with fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, some said that maybe some consumers shopped earlier than normal. Whatever it was retail activity did have to buoy the morale of many dealers and manufacturers as they saw products seemingly fly off of retail shelves.
Another development that has to help their morale, and sagging inventories, was the contract agreement between West Coast dock employers and the union. While the settlement would have helped substantially if it had been reached in early October vs. mid-November, it doesn't hurt.
According to a variety of CE industry sources TWICE spoke to in the past month, by the time the agreement was reached the impact of the ten-day shutdown and work slowdown had begun to recede. Manufacturers were, and are, slowly getting the right products to the right retailers for Christmas.
Industry insiders also told TWICE that some spot inventory problems will remain for several weeks as certain product categories and suppliers, who rely on Asian factories more than others.
But the relief on the part of many in the industry is that deliveries for the second and third most lucrative months of the year for consumer electronics sales — January and February — will not be effected by a second port shutdown. That could be a reason for holiday cheer for everyone.
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