Christmas creep
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Christmas creep is the commercial phenomenon of merchants and retailers exploiting the commercialized status of Christmas by moving up the start of the holiday shopping season.[1] The term was first used in the mid 1980's.[2]
It is associated with a desire of merchants to take advantage of particularly heavy Christmas-related shopping well before Black Friday in the US and before Halloween in Canada and the UK. It can apply for other holidays as well, notably Valentine's Day, Easter and Mother's Day. The motivation for holiday creep is for retailers to lengthen their selling season for seasonal merchandise in order to maximize profit and to give early-bird shoppers a headstart on that holiday. However, it is not clear that this practice has been consistently beneficial for retailers.[3]
In U.S. retail, the phenomenon was pioneered by stores like Costco, which introduced early Christmas sales to support resellers. The hardware chain Lowe's followed in 2000 with a policy of setting out Christmas trees and decorations by October 1. In 2002-2003, Christmas creep accelerated markedly with retailers such as Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Target beginning their Christmas sales in October [4]. In 2006 the National Retail Federation, an industry trade group, said that 40 percent of consumers planned to start their holiday shopping before Halloween. In the case of Christmas, the increasing use of the word holiday instead of Christmas within the past few decades has allowed merchants to distribute seasonal merchandise without specifically mentioning the name of the holiday earlier without making Christmas seem too obvious. Since around 1990, Thanksgiving has practically been merged with the December holidays[citation needed].
Seasonal creep is not limited to the winter holiday season and other popular holidays and observances, but is also becoming more common for merchandise associated with a general season of the year. Advertising for winter-, spring-, summer-, and fall-related goods generally now begins midway through the previous season.
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- ^ Siewers, Alf (1987-11-25). He's well-suited to enjoying life of Santa. Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved on 2007-12-26. “And so does the culture, with a commercializing of himself that Santa deplores even as he has watched the holiday season creep back to Labor Day.”
- ^ Maxwell, Kerry (2006-09-18). Macmillan English Dictionary Word Of The Week Archive - "Christmas creep". New Words. Macmillan Publishers. Retrieved on 2007-12-26. “The term Christmas creep was first used in the mid-eighties, though gained wider recognition more recently, possibly due to subsequent coinage of the expression mission creep.”
- ^ Christmas Creep: The Shopping Season Is Longer, but Is It Better?. Knowledge@Wharton. Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (2006-03-01). Retrieved on 2007-12-27. “But Wharton marketing scholars and other analysts say an extended Christmas season is something of a mixed bag. It may hold advantages, disadvantages -- or even no advantages -- for store owners.”
- ^ Christmas Creeps Into Stores, San Diego Union-Tribune, October 25, 2006. Accessed November 18, 2007.
