Not a blog to be tossed aside lightly — it should be thrown with great force
Back to School? Halloween? But Why Haven't You Done Your Christmas Shopping, Slacker?
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
-
A couple of years and a few (hundred?) pounds ago, I went on CBS This Morning to talk to the lovely Gayle King and Norah O'Donnell about how Christmas advertising and retail holiday displays seem to happen earlier and earlier each year (see video above) — and how much everybody, including Gayle and Norah, supposedly hates that, even though marketers clearly didn't get the memo. (My local Walmart already has pre-lit Christmas trees on sale — even though the whole Northeast is in the midst of another fires-of-hell heat wave this week.) You might think it's a purely American phenomenon, what with our hyperconsumerist culture, but you'd be wrong. As Reuters reports, Santa himself showed up last week to open the Christmas shop at Selfridges department store in London. The whole Christmas in the summer thing may be working, too, as retailers seem to be making headway persuading us to jingle our wallets earlier. According to the National Retail Federation, 10 percent of adults in the U.S. start shopping for the holidays during the month of August. That's not all. Some consumers are getting a jump on holiday decorating, too — which, besides infuriating your neighbors, apparently has the added benefit of a Xanax or a shot of Jack Daniels or whatever your fix for staying chipper happens to be. A recent study found that those of us who put up our trees, lights, menorahs and stockings earlier are happier people. As Steve McKeown, a psychoanalyst, puts it: "In a world of stress and anxiety, people like to associate to things that make them happy, and Christmas decorations evoke those strong feelings of childhood ... so putting up Christmas decorations early extends the excitement." What was that somebody once said? Oh, yeah: Bah, humbug.
"As agencies have moved more aggressively into the domain of commerce media, one has to wonder about the role of Amazon — specifically, how the holding companies and independent agencies setting up retail units impacted their all-important relationship with the 800-lb. gorilla of the space." (from Digiday's editorial series on the state of retail media)
It's official: that gleaming monument to hubris known as Hudson Yards—the mega-development on the West Side that made Tenth Avenue unnavigable for years and ruined the Manhattan skyline with a bunch of ugly, dystopian towers, not to mention that rusting atrocity The Vessel—is a big fat $25 billion flop, as the Times reports. I'm sure similar, schadenfreude-stoked stories were written in the 1930s when the Empire State Building opened just in time for the Great Depression and sat half empty for years, but Hudson Yards is uniquely ill-timed, maybe even irredeemably cursed, as the pandemic has shuttered its marquee tenants (most notably Dallas import Neiman Marcus—as if the city didn't already have a surplus of homegrown retailers selling a bunch of overpriced stuff nobody can afford), while even that suicide-inviting, stairway-to-nowhere monstrosity that is its centerpiece has been mothballed. And the residents of the city are stuck with a hideous heap of hulking, deserted ...
If you are a working journalist, as I am, you could be forgiven for wanting to off yourself daily for being reminded by other reporters of what a complete failure you are. Let me say upfront that I have enjoyed the spoils of my career, of which there have been many. I've been honored to rub elbows with famous journalists and other bold-faced names. I've attended the Oscars, talked at the Cannes ad festival, and partied at the Tribeca Film Festival. I've gone on TV to talk about this or that on occasion. I've had celebrity writers pick fights with me, some of them public — among them Salman Rushdie and the late Jimmy Breslin. Those were a lot of fun. But I never saw myself as the story. How naive of me. Professors, albeit brilliant ones, who like to write about current events are now being classified not just as journalists but as superstar journalists. Consider Ben Smith's puff piece on Heather Cox Richardson in the Times this week. Richardson teaches American hi...
