The Bad Holiday Season

A lot has happened in the couple of weeks that I was off.

Apparently, the Christmas season wasn’t as good as many retailers had hoped for. What is worse is that nobody seemed to be spared.

The big story seemed to be the credit breach that happened at Target. How could they not have known about the problem for nearly 3 weeks, which has affected about 40 million customers? I have the feeling that this was an inside job and not something that some person in some foreign company did. Yet, our lovely government wants to waste taxpayer money to do an investigation on this issue. My thought is let the FBI and other agencies handle this and leave Congress out of this.

Once again this year, purchasers of iPads at Walmart were greeted with boxes that did not have the actual items in the box. This problem happened to them a couple of years ago as well. Didn’t they learn anything then to repeat the problem?

Also apparently Walmart had issues regarding their doorbusters not being in-stock in some stores. To make matters worse, the prices were wrong as well. Add to this the long lines and this store was a nightmare.

Online retailers such as Amazon fared no better as the shipping companies could not deliver their packages in a timely manner before the holidays. Those that paid for express or 2 day shipping found their packages taking as long as 2 weeks for delivery. Isn’t it time that the shipping companies had more than one distribution hub?

So besides theses major burps, what else did I notice at the stores?

There was a complete lack of customer service at all the retail stores I visited over the holidays. Everybody knows you can never get help at Walmart, but I expected that places like Target would do better at trying to satisfy the customer. Every time I had help at Target, the person was incompetent to find what I was looking for, but ironically the product wound up on the shelf a couple hours later. Do they employees even bother looking in the backroom for merchandise or do they just fake it. I know during my time at Staples more often than not, the employee just faked the search by just hanging out in the backroom for about 5 minutes and coming back to the customer saying they could not find the product. Hardly a way to do business but it happens way too frequently.

Many of the products were sold out before Thanksgiving and were not restocked during the holiday season. Empty shelves dominated as products disappeared especially in the toy section. I have not seen this type of emptiness since my days at Woolworth where the old joke after the holidays was “what toy department? We have a toy department?”

There was also no strong must have item this holiday season. No toy or electronic item really was in high demand and those people who bought one of the new gaming systems didn’t have money to buy much of anything else.

This year there also seemed to be a lack of new Christmas CDs. I counted only about 4 or 5 new discs this year which seemed to be the lowest in years.

It also seemed that Christmas ornaments were just mundane as well as nothing really stood out as a must-have item. It all seemed like more of the same that we have seen year after year.

Overall, it seemed that this holiday season was a complete bust. There was absolutely nothing to be jolly about this past season. It seemed that Santa’s naughty list will be much longer next year. Let’s hope that retailers do better next Christmas.

Update: a few ago I discussed the bad things that can happen with email receipts. Well, over the last couple of weeks, I received 2 email receipts that didn’t belong to me. One was from a self-storage company, which I thought I had taken care of months ago, and the other was from a Best Buy store in Louisiana. I didn’t even know that Best Buy was even doing this type of receipts. Unfortunately I couldn’t get in contact with them through email to tell them of their problem. It should be noted that both of these emails came through my Gmail account which has been a problem for a very long time. I guess this is the old case of ask and you shall receive even if it isn’t yours.