Holiday Sales Hangover

It's official: the 2007 holiday shopping season were disappointing. But looking at some figures from a Financial Times article, let's consider the nature of disappointment. MasterCard Advisors said that retail spending climbed only 3.6 percent from Thanksgiving to Christmas, and "when the International Council of Shopping Centres warned that same-store sales or sales at stores open a year during the November-December period were below projections of a 2.5 per cent gain."

Clearly investors and businesspeople are only happy when there is a significant rise in sales year over year. But satisfaction is a relative term, and depends completely on expectations. Having rosy expectations when credit is mangled, when people are stuck with ballooning housing prices, and when fuel is up enormously over last year is simply deranged thinking. How could anyone expect the average person to be willing to go even more into debt to line the pockets of a relative few? You can't expect people to inhale and never to exhale, and so you cannot expect them to always shell out more this year than last, particularly when you want that number to exceed inflation. When asking themselves, "What could we have done better?" I think a wise answer might be, "Stop telling ourselves stories to feel better, and face reality so we can consider viable options, not fairy tales."