So What, Who Cares (vol 3, issue 51) Why You Already Began Your Back-to-School Shopping
Hello!
Let us all be glad we made it to the end of the week. Today's pop culture rec is especially timely given the weird kerfluffle over one of Vogue's four September issue covers.
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When I walked into Target on July 5 and saw how the red-white-and-blue tchotchkes had been replaced with pencil cases and Moana lunchboxes, I muttered, "Too soon, too soon." However, that's an old-school attitude: Thanks to e-commerce and the ability to find bargains year-round -- as opposed to the Reagan-era practice of scouring store flyers for specials on looseleaf paper every August -- the "season" for back-to-school shopping opens nearly immediately after the school year ends.
Accelerating this shopping calendar? Amazon.com. Thanks to Prime Day -- and the cavalcade of copycat events from competitors who want to lure shoppers to their sites so long as they're pointing, clicking and copying their credit-card numbers on websites -- a lot of families have shifted their school supply shopping to mid-summer. The National Retail Federation released its shopping forecast on July 13, noting, "More families will tackle their back-to-school lists early this year with 27 percent beginning two months before the beginning of school, up from 22 percent last year." The biggest drivers for shopping early? Saving money, either by spreading out the spending or pouncing on sales events.
The early back-to-school shoppers have been great for Amazon. OneClick Retail just reported:
In 2016, Back to School sales grew by 9% during the first two weeks and went on to record 20% growth over the season. This year, with Amazon sales already up by 35%, suggests a total growth potential of over 80% for Back to School 2017.
The kicker to Amazon's growing back-to-school sales? Their prices are not great. A recent study from Wikibuy, a company with a price-comparison browser extension, found that Amazon's school supply prices are about 15% higher than other sites.
Granted, Wikibuy is using the study to show how their extension can save you money, but it is worth remembering that last year, Amazon had begun phasing out price comparisons on its website, i.e. telling you how much an item used to be and how big a discount you were netting by purchasing it at the price they had set. You can't rely on the company's search tool to automatically rank things by price either; a ProPublica investigation found that the site's search engine prioritized Amazon-based goods over partner deals also available through the site.
So what? It's been fascinating watching how being able to shop 24-7 has disrupted the American retail calendar and sales schedule. Until comparatively recently, sales had predictable cycles, often tied to national holidays.
With the rise of e-commerce, that relationship has been inverted, where the sales days happen first and the holidays follow: Gray Thursday -- i.e. Thanksgiving -- was introduced as a big sales day in 2015, as a precedent to Black Friday. Then came Small Business Saturday (introduced by American Express in 2010), then Cyber Monday, , introduced by the digital retail division of the National Retail Federation in 2005; Giving Tuesday (after Cyber Monday), started by the 92nd Street Y in 2012; Green Monday, created by eBay in 2007 because one Cyber Monday in December is not enough; Free Shipping Day (a week before Christmas), 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.
With Amazon Prime Day, it's like Christmas in July -- especially when other merchants try to capitalize on consumer awareness of the event -- so imagine the potential shopping holidays that can arise any time an e-commerce retailer decides they need to goose sales.
Who cares? Amateur and professional retail spectators -- both the people who make money in retail and those seeking to spend their dollars wisely. Old-school consumer publications used to publish calendars of when to expect different consumer categories to go on sale -- televisions around the Super Bowl, lawn furniture in May, etc. The new-school, global e-commerce market is going to require a whole new set of consumer smarts. Convenience is now nearly as critical to shoppers as price. How else to explain why shoppers are willing to pay up to 15% more for school supplies at a site? They're getting something out of the experience, and that something is a frictionless retail experience that's both highly situational and reactive.
For example: imagine sitting around with friends at a barbecue and two of them begin talking about bento lunch boxes as an easy way to keep school lunches organized. It is five minutes of effort to pull out your smartphone, ask a few questions after bringing up Amazon (either via app or on your browser) and order the bento lunchbox for your own household. Then you're back to drinking a beer, conversation's moved on to something else, and you've also knocked an item off the school shopping list.
Returning again to the topic of old-school supply shopping and budgets: I'm old enough to remember seeing people driving around town with the bumpers stickers that read "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." How long until we see a variant where Amazon wish lists have supplanted bake sales? If one of you has run across the U.S. Air Force's wish list for bombers -- or maybe their Subscribe-and-Save setup for airsickness bags -- let me know.
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Your pop culture recommendation for the day: I needed a distraction on Tuesday night and thus ended up watching The First Monday in May, a pleasantly absorbing documentary about the creative process behind curating and throwing the 2015 Met Gala.
This event -- first begun in the 1950s, then nudged into the fashion-world trajectory by Diana Vreeland in the 1970s (more on La Vreeland in this SWWC) -- is basically the prom for fashion-y and pop a-listers, swaddled in fundraising for the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute and finished with obsessive online coverage. In 2015, the theme for the gala and the accompanying exhibit was China: Through the Looking Glass.
And so the scenes in The First Monday in May where the Costume Institute folks and the Vogue folks have to field well-founded concerns from dedicated Asian art curators, pointedly skeptical Chinese journalists, gala co-chair Wendi Deng, and gala artistic director Wong Kar Wai ... in every one of those scenes, I was reminded of Simon Winchester's piece for the New York Times, "Gathering Storm: A History of the Complicated U.S.-China Relationship Since 1776," in which he writes:
What only Chinese writers seem properly to comprehend — and which goes largely unmentioned here — is the inherent imbalance of the relationship: that while America has been intimately involved with China for the entirety of this country’s independent existence, China’s roughly 250-year awareness of America amounts (once you recall that a sovereign Chinese state has been around for thousands of years) to a paltry few percent of China’s own time on the planet.
So when curator Andrew Bolton tells his (very gentle) critics that it's good to be provocative for the sake of provocation so why not put a Red Army uniform next to ancient Buddha statues, I could practically see everyone else in the room taking a deep breath and reminding themselves of the necessity of taking a very, very long view.
This documentary is fascinating for how it shows great PR machines at work, but I especially enjoyed how it quietly exalts the anonymous armies of gifted, dedicated people who make stunning couture and gorgeous museum exhibits possible for the enjoyment of the gilded few and then the grubby masses. You may also enjoy watching Justin Bieber bring the same historical reverence to a uniform worn during the Cultural Revolution as he did to his visit to the Anne Frank house. (There are many other dishy, gossipy moments.)
Here's a Pinterest board the museum did for the exhibit -- look at it, then go find the documentary on Netflix or rent it on Amazon or iTunes.
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