The U.S. retail industry has the unique ability to transform just about any minor occasion into a major consuming opportunity. As creative as they can be, retailers are always happy to see holiday celebrations, major sporting events, and long weekends roll around on the retail calendar because these are the occasions that can easily motivate spending. That is, unless they all fall on the same weekend.
Having the opening of the Winter Olympics, the Daytona 500, Valentine's Day and President's Day all fall on the same weekend was not really in the best interest of the U.S. retail industry this year. Like having too many open house invitations between Christmas and New Year's, trying to participate in back-to-back events starts off fun, but usually ends in celebration overload.
There were just too many occasions jammed into one February pay period this year. Rather than boosting retail spending, as each individual event normally would do, the holidaypalooza this weekend forced consumers to choose and industries to share. Choosing and sharing are good things, but they are not necessarily helpful to a recovering economy.
Perhaps that's one of the reasons why, according to an NRF survey, 80% of U.S. adult consumers were not planning to spend money at a florist, 64% were not planning to go out to dinner, and 40% were planning to skip playing the cupid game completely this past Valentine's weekend. And perhaps the big-occasion weekend overload is also to blame for the expected drop in spending for traditional Valentine's gifts of candy, jewelry, and flowers, as reported by market research company IBIS World.
With the spending of the average American man predicted to be $135, it's easy to understand why jewelry sales were also expected to be down for Valentine's Day 2010. Even at the Zales bankruptcy-avoidance desperation sales, $135 doesn't buy many diamonds.
So, now we know about what consumers weren't planning on doing with their money and time on Olympic-NASCAR-Valentine-President's weekend 2010. What did they do instead?
We know that a huge number of couples spent at least part of their Valentine's weekend watching "Valentine's Day," the movie. Even though the reviews were not particularly favorable, and it is a quintessential Garry Marshall chick flick, apparently there were plenty of men who won bonus points by sitting through "Valentine's Day" and other big screen productions on Valentine's weekend. All in all, box offices collected 183 million valentines for Hollywood this weekend.
The rare back-to-back holidays on Sunday and Monday gave more U.S. consumers the opportunity for a romantic getaway this past weekend. It was expected that the amount spent on Valentine's trips in 2010 would increase, compared to last year. Both the travel and hospitality industry had about two billion reasons to celebrate this year's calendar anomaly and what U.S. consumers decided to do with it.
Another 150,000 consumers traded the smell of roses and scented candles for the smell of burning rubber at the Daytona 500. While men were earning bonus points at the movie theaters, there were tens of thousands of women winning an equal number of bonus points at the NASCAR race that just wouldn't end on Sunday. The pothole-filling only adding to the romance of the day for those who are in love with chugging beer out of plastic cups and watching cars go around in circles. Sunshine state retailers were happy to get their share of the 670 million valentines that race fans distributed at the NASCAR classic in Daytona over Valentine's weekend.
That annual "Super Bowl of auto racing" in Daytona had to share the sports spotlight this year with the 2010 Winter Olympics, which opened in Vancouver this past weekend as well. Some Americans took their Valentine's budget across the border and spent $1,100 (each) for seats at the Opening Ceremonies, which undoubtedly will substitute for candy and chocolates for the next ten years for some couples. It wasn't the Olympic show itself that blew the Valentine weekend budget, it was the additional $1,100 spent on dinner and hotel afterwards that made it a pricey date. To our neighbors up north, green was the color of love this Valentine's weekend.
By the way, U.S. retailers have definitely cut back on their sports sponsorship budgets in this post-recessionary year, but the U.S. retail industry certainly has not abandoned its affiliation with sports altogether. When looking at the lists of retail Super Bowl advertisers, retail NASCAR sponsors, and retail Olympics partners, we can see that there is still a wide variety of retail sports sponsorships, but there are not many retail companies that show up on more than one of these sports sponsorship lists in 2010.
The last retail opportunity of the weekend was Monday's President's Day, traditionally a day of closed banks, discounted furniture, and car dealership wheelin' deals. Positioned at the end of a weekend overstuffed with occasions, though, it was difficult for the annual President's Day retail hype to stand out, and even more difficult for consumers to justify additional purchases immediately following their obligatory Valentine's spending.
In a better economy, the new discount mattress purchased at the Sears (SHLD) President's sale would have been covered in rose petals borrowed from the Valentine's Day bouquet, and a few pieces of imported chocolates would have found their way onto the pillows. The new frugality, however, dictates that practicality trumps frivolity, and "both" is not really an acceptable choice.
Consumers definitely consumed this past Olympic-NASCAR-Valentine-President's weekend, they just didn't consume in the traditional way. The entertainment, airline, sports, hospitality, and retail industry each got their share of the love, but each was wishing they had more of an exclusive relationship with U.S. consumers.
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