Many retailers may wind up with a surplus of certain items after the holiday shopping season is over.
All those people who tried to score deals during Black Friday may be in for an unpleasant surprise: the true discounts are coming in January.
Amid shipping delays and stores over-ordering inventory to prevent running out during critical times, many retailers may wind up with a surplus of certain items after the holiday shopping season is over.
"They probably also don’t have a lot of space to just store that inventory for the following season," NRF's chief economist Jack Kleinhenz told Bloomberg.
Anticipation to this year's holiday shopping period has led to much talk of pent-up demand — after a year of putting off major purchases, many predicted that shoppers would return to physical stores with a renewed vengeance.
But while data coming out of Black Friday did find that shopping increased 29.8% from 2020, inflation and difficulty finding staff to work as new variants of the coronavirus emerge mean that demand could continue to taper off from now until the end of the holidays.
That, in turn, could lead to many retailers marking down the surplus of inventory still in stores.
Gap, Bath & Body Works and Old Navy are some of the stores that have recently struggled with finding staff and, according to Bloomberg, have been observed with messy shelves full of inventory.
With the threat of further lockdowns due to the omicron variant always present, there is always the risk that lofty expectations will not live up to the reality of what consumers end up spending.
"This new virus variant is just as serious as any that we’ve seen, but we don’t have enough data yet to know how it will impact consumers and households," Kleinhenz said.
精彩评论