Nov
23
The truth about Black Friday
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“When Black Friday comes/I’ll stand down by the door/And catch the grey men when they/Dive from the fourteenth floor.”
–”Black Friday,” Steely Dan, from ”Katy Lied.”
The most frequently mentioned Black Friday, because it comes around every year, is the day after Thanksgiving, which is often erroneously referred to as “the official start of Christmas shopping season” and “the busiest retail sales day of the year.”
As you can see above, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker weren’t referring to that Black Friday in their 1975 album, but to the Black Thursday stock market crash of 1929, which they may have been confusing with the Black Friday Wall Street panic of 1869 caused by two guys’ attempts to corner the gold market.
Another Steely Dan song is slightly more appropriate:
“You’ll need the tools for survival/And the medicine for the blues/Sweet treats and surprises/For the little buckaroos.”
–”The Last Mall,” from “Everything Must Go,” Steely Dan.
That song seems to actually be about some apocalyse, but never mind that. Black Friday is indeed an important day in the retail calendar, but that importance used to be exaggerated by the media, and by doing that for decades we in the media seem to be turning Black Friday into what we said it was all along.
In the 1960s, Christmas decorations in most cities did not appear until the day after Thanksgiving (and people wrote columns complaining that this rushed the season) when most people have a day off but nothing to do except eat leftovers.
By the 1970s we had gotten used to it — the “rushing the season” columns were confined to the first stores to put the seasonal decorations even earlier — and television stations gave heavy coverage because it was an interesting, telegenic story on a really slow news day.
I don’t know if this is true everywhere, but in the Baltimore-Washington area where I grew up the original meaning of Black Friday in the context of the day after Thanksgiving was negative, referring to the traffic jams at shopping centers. But after awhile the term was co-opted by retailers who said it meant the juncture at which they stopping operating “in the red” and began running “in the black,” a reference to the fact that most retailers do at least a third of their annual business between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The International Conference of Shopping Centers provides retail sales and traffic data for the seasonal season starting from Black Friday, which is often wrongly treated as an official gospel of total retail sales.
Until recent years, even the ICSC was careful to tell anyone willing to listen that Black Friday, while a busy day for foot traffic, was never the biggest sales day — that was always the last Saturday before Christmas.
But in 2003 and 2005, Black Friday came in first, and it was second in 2004. Truth has come into alignment with news reports.
If you parse the shopping season by calendar weeks, measuring Sunday-to-Saturday cycles the way Hospitality Advisors does for hotels, then the three weeks from Thanksgiving each account for 14% or 15% of seasonal sales, the next week gets 18% and the last week before Christmas accounts for 23% of sales.
Thanksgiving weekend by itself accounts for roughly 10% of seasonal sales. So, yes, it’s a big deal.
Nov
22
I’m an L-tripto fan
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Most Americans know more big words in the medical field than in any other arena of human endeavor — because it’s personal, about their own bodies.
Talk to someone who ain’t got no good grammar about his health and suddenly he’s discussing endocardiograms and platelets and swellings of the bursa. He knows about what ails him.
When we talk turkey, we all talk about L-triptophan, the mysterious substance that we all seem to know about which turkey contains, and which makes us drowsy.
But does it?
In recent years I have heard that most nutritionists think what really makes us drowsy is carbo overload, or the simple diversion of blood flow from the brain to the digestive system because we ate a meal that was twice as big as usual.
So I looked it up. I googled for triptophan, and read sources from kiddie nutrition sites to Wikipedia to specialized medical journals, filtering out the bits that weren’t mention in the more detailed articles.
L-triptophan is the most common kind of triptophan in human food and you might as well leave the ‘L’ off, so I will.
Triptophan may sound like a former Soviet republic but that’s okay since turkey sounds like a country, too.
Turkey, in this instance, is my favorite food (really) and triptophan is one of its chemical ingredients, one of 20 standard amino acids. It trips off a sequence of chemical reactions in your brain’s neurotransmitters, creating a feeling of relaxation.
Turkey is not the only food that is rich in triptophan. You can find more per bite in both pork and cheese. Triptophan is also in milk, bread and pasta, and peanut butter and chocolate.
Despite the very real effect, the more learned sites I checked confirmed that the Thanksgiving effect is very probably associated more with overeating than with what you’re eating.
But a meal of pork and cheese, finished off with sweetened milk, probably will give you a mild sense of pleasant relaxation. (I said sweetened because sugar interferes with competing chemicals, thus facilitating the effect.)
Happy Thanksgiving!
Nov
21
Oceanic Time Warner Cable next month will begin offering MTV’s Logo network, on digital channel 542.Logo is a gay and lesbian channel.
As an analog cable customer, my first reaction was, “They have more than 500 channels?”
I can remember when even in a major metropolitan area there were only four channels. And one of them was running “Three Stooges” movies.
My second reaction was, “What could possibly be offered to gay and lesbian viewers that can’t already be found on the other 400 channels, or even on the 70 channels I get?”
I have basic cable. I don’t even get HBO. But this didn’t stop me from having access to “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” “Will & Grace,” “Brokeback Mountain,” and that grayhair guy in the suit who does the makeover show and folds his hands across his chest a lot.
So what are we talking about here?
“CSI Key West”?
“Desperate Houseboys”?
Let me put it another way, by making this about me instead of about gays and lesbians: why would I watch a network that was all about rumpled middle-aged guys with beards that need reading glasses?
I can understand why advertisers, regardless of their own companionship preferences, would like a for-gays network — another way of defining gays is, “single people who, as a result of being single, have more disposable income.” But really, one assumes this target demographic is already watching mainstream television. Even there, it seems silly to assume that gays only watch shows with gay themes.
Larry King is heterosexual and Jewish — but watched nightly by gays and goys. His appeal has nothing to do with those two particular descriptions of him. I’m guessing the suspenders don’t make much difference, either.
The gay cable network is actually but an extreme example of something interesting about broadcast programming and advertising targets.
Advertisers target people of certain age groups, or sexes, or marital status. Oxygen is aimed at female viewers. ESPN is aimed at males.
I asked a friend of mine who programs a sports talk station why his hosts often talk about subjects other than sports, and he said, “The thing you need to understand, Howard, is that this isn’t sports radio. This is guy radio. We can talk about anything that sells radial tires and beer.”
Advertisers like it a lot when a show reaches ONLY their target, say, guys who drink beer, because that means they’re not wasting money buying access to other audiences that won’t drink beer no matter how good the commercial is.
By the way, if you’re my age (I’m 54) you will be interested to know that some advertisers have no interest in reaching you because they believe that most people, by the age of 50, have formed opinions about their favorite brands, and don’t readily change their minds.
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