They may be a free loan, but if they are keeping you from moving your merchandise, than they become a problem. You've moved the sale back in time, and have stuff sitting on your shelves (which you have to finance). If enough people take the easy out and just give gift cards, retailers are left with a big problem. If they time shift enough of their sales from before Christmas when hopefully they're getting better prices to after Christmas when they're dumping, their margins just wen to hell and any "free" money effect went up in smoke. Time shift the purchase far enough into the future and you actually lost a sale. Say it's now March the person was going to the store to buy something, and would be buying it, gift card or not. But he uses the gift card, just cause he has to before it "expires". You actually just lost a Christmas sale. The sale in March would have happened anyways, and the gift card only determines who's paying for it. What the person really got for Christmas was nothing, and you lost a sale in Dec. without getting an addition sale in March. You lose.
And from looking at this Garden Ridge flyer I got in the mail today, retailers are losing. Have you ever heard of a pre-Christmas clearance sale? 75%, 50%, 40% and 30%. It appears almost ALL their holiday decorations are either 50% or some even 75% off. We're still over a week away from Christmas and already 50% off on most Christmas decorations??? And looking at the lead time to get the flyer designed, printed and mailed, they would have had to decided probably by last Monday the 8th, forget profits, just try and get the stuff out of the stores. I'm assuming that was a rush ad, and not planned in advance. If not, then back before Thanksgiving they were already planning to dump all their Christmas decorations the week before Christmas. Where's the sense in that?
I think Christmas shopping has changed for ever and not for the good of retailers. Where's the profit in $30 DVD players? And if you can't get what you're looking for on sale, or can't decide, and gift cards become acceptable, than the retailers in their fight for your dollar have done themselves in.
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