Boxing Day....Month??? Year?????

I remember the good old days, when Boxing Day in Canada meant companies heavily discounting prices on all the crappy products that they were trying to get rid of all year but just couldn't. Cue the red tag, red pen, or any other type of redness that can be used to demonstrate a slashing of prices. What? You mean our 8-track/vinyl/cd player all in one didn't move? Mark it down 75 percent and call it a doorcrasher. Then shmucks would line up at the door starting early in the morning and make a run for that 8-track/vinyl/cd 3-in-1 combo they had their eyes on for the last 2 days when the flyer was delivered to their home. I had the pleasure of working in a retail environment on a number of boxing days, that is neither here nor there so i'll save those stories for another time.

What unfortunately has happened with boxing day is companies have captured consumers attention and wallets on that specific day and are now trying to bottle it up and unleash it for longer and longer and now are starting earlier and earlier. Therefore they will eventually erode all the hard work that Boxing Day put into building itself up to being the ultimate shopping day of the year. Now maybe this works better for retailers because they get a longer length of increased sales from customers looking for deals during "Boxing Week" but when you start advertising "Pre-Boxing Day Sales", well, your customers will catch on eventually.

People will either start holding back all their major purchases till "Boxing Month" or they will realize that not everything can be discounted all the time and will theorize that maybe your margins are a little too high and future advertising for boxing day sales will be completely lost in the clutter of regular flyers and regular advertising.

Either way it will be interesting to see how far in front of and behind the 26th of December retailers can move. I look forward to when Boxing Day sales outpace the first Christmas commercial of the year which usually comes around about September 1st.