So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 55) What we're going to be calling Thanksgiving now
Hello, and welcome to the six hundred and forty-seven new subscribers who have signed on since last Thursday. The powers of Metafilter and Six Colors are astounding, and I have MeFi user ThePinkSuperhero and Six Colors publisher Jason Snell to thank for the mentions.
So, all you new people, is now an okay time to tell you we won't have a So What, Who Cares? issue on Thursday night/Friday morning? I'll resume the four-days-a-week schedule on December 1.
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Thanksgiving has a new name: "Gray Thursday." Or so says the San Francisco Chronicle, which details the sixteen days of shopping around the holiday season. The new nickname for the fourth Thursday in November foreshadows the classic opening of the holiday commerce marathon, Black Friday (11/28).
Other days of commerce include: Small Business Saturday (11/29), introduced by American Express in 2010 and, oh my gosh, people who use their AmEx cards at approved vendors are eligible for up to $30 in rebates; Cyber Monday (12/1), introduced by the digital retail division of the National Retail Federation in 2005; Giving Tuesday (12/2), started by the 92nd Street Y in 2012; Green Monday (12/8), created by eBay in 2007 because one Cyber Monday in December is not enough; Free Shipping Day (12/18), which popped into existence in 2008 as "an opportunity [for merchants] to extend the online holiday shopping season"; and Gift Card Exchange Day (12/26), launched in 2010 by discount gift card marketplace Gift Card Granny.
So what? In the past eight years, we have seen the launch of six new targeted retail promotion events aimed at holiday shoppers, four of which are meant to goose e-commerce sales.
In that same period, we've seen U.S. holiday e-commerce sales rise from $19.6 billion dollars in 2005 to $46.55 billion in 2013. That's a nearly two-and-a-half times increase in e-commerce sales. (I'm sorry, I have a hard time typing 237%. It just seems unnatural.)
Here's how the growth of e-commerce as a segment of holiday sales compares to the overall growth of holiday sales in the U.S.: In 2005, total holiday sales spending in the U.S. was $436.15 billion dollars; last year, it was $601.8 billion dollars. That's a growth rate of 38% in holiday sales overall.
As for e-commerce as a percentage of total holidays: In 2005, e-commerce sales made up approximately 4.5% of total holiday sales. In 2013, e-commerce sales made up 7.7% of total holiday sales.
Who cares? The people who launched all these new retail events, who are going to point to the rise in e-commerce sales as proof that their events influenced shoppers? Be on the lookout for analysts who will talk about the rise of e-commerce as a disruptive force in retail, in the future we're all shopping on our mobile devices, and so on.
However, it's handy to remember that on the whole, e-commerce spending in the U.S. makes up approximately 6% of all retail spending, and the general trend among retailers is to look at a fully-integrated sales strategy where both online and offline sales experiences are part of the overall brand. (vol 1, issue 41; vol 1, issue 31)
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The world's weather is ruining both the wine and chocolate industries. Dry weather in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, where 70% of the world's cocoa is produced, has hurt production in the region. (Also not helping: the recent Ebola outbreak.) Combine the underproducing farms with a rising global appetite for chocolate and consumption is outpacing production. Fine, you say. I'll just get my nightly antioxidants from red wine. Think again: Because of our steadily warming planet, it's getting harder to grow the grapes for wine. As Buzzfeed reports:
The U.S. government’s 2014 National Climate Assessment, which lays out in spectacular detail and no uncertain terms what our country should anticipate in terms of climate change, summarizes American wine’s situation thusly: “The area capable of consistently producing grapes required for the highest quality wines is projected to decline by more than 50% by late this century.”
So what? Climate change has already been shown to affect fish stock (estimated to drop between 40-60% by 2050) and curb the yield on staple crops like wheat and corn. But whatever, those foods are only the building blocks of diets all over the world. This is serious! This is chocolate and wine.
Who cares? People who love joy, i.e. people who like either wine or chocolate. Companies that make a lot of money off chocolate, such as S.A. Nestle. Also affected: People who want to get in on this surging demand for chocolate and make some moola. As the Christian Science Monitor notes:
As demand increases, it's possible that cacao farmers will rise to the supply challenge. Higher prices could lead some to switch to - or invest in boosting - cacao production, in time supplying more of the global commodity to a growing middle class that's acquiring a taste, and the income, for the Mayan treat.
Bonus reading: Elizabeth Bear's short story, "This Chance Planet," mentions both the paucity of chocolate and wine, and I loved how this one passage sketched the collapse of an entire economy:
Ilya had even found wine somewhere, which was almost too good to be true. Wine is hard to come by: the old vineyards are dying in the heat, and the new ones aren’t yet well-established. That’s what I heard, anyway.
Do you have any favorite short stories where the little details sink their hooks into your memories? Tell me via email or Twitter.
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Your pop culture note of the day: I first got into Noelle Stevenson courtesy of her hilarious sketches of Hawkeye for the Hawkeye Initiative (the movement to point out that many women in comics are drawn in ridiculous and/or improbable ways).
She's also got a great, epic webcomic that just wrapped up, Nimona, and I loved it from the first installment, especially since that installment was a cheeky take-down of the "spirited, on-the-cusp-of-womanhood sidekick" trope that's sprung up in books from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns to Green Arrow.
And now, Stevenson will be enshrined in the Marvel library as a contributor -- she'll have a story in the Thor Annual, coming out in February 2015.
I found out via Jason Aaron's Twitter feed, mostly by accident, because I was about to tell you about how you should all be reading his work, specifically, catching up on Scalped -- which Wired once called, correctly, "Comics' Answer to Deadwood and The Wire."
Anyway: Go binge on Noelle Stevenson's online work and see if you know anyone who will lend you the first few TPBs for Scalped in time for Thanksgiving.
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Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here.
Also, there is now a topic index that tells you what was in each issue. If you're like, "When did she send out a picture of Brandon Routh snuggling a kitty cat?" -- well, now you can find it. (It was November 11, 2014, btw.)
As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions via email or Twitter. Always let me know what you think about So What, Who Cares? If you really like it, tell a friend to subscribe.