The new electronic world has certainly brought many changes to holiday shopping and holiday shopper behavior.  And I’m still pondering if I think these changes are good, bad or just silly.

I worked in retail, first as a teenager at Hollywood Sports Plaza in South Coast Plaza, where I sold cool sporting goods to a really loyal and fun group of regular customers.  Even the holiday season was fun back then… South Coast Plaza had a Sears and a JC Penney. And about 100 stores in between.  There was the Carousel Court, a great Santa for Christmas, and a true camaraderie amongst the various store employees.  I must have had 15 layaways accounts all over the mall, and knew almost everyone who worked in my favorite stores.  We had Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter off, and we were grateful.

I then went into Mall Management in my 30s… with a truly great privately held company that valued their staff and all of the stores and employees of their malls.  They wanted to make money, of course, but it was the golden age of retail and malls were crowded, 100% leased and all was right with the world.  We worked hard… I averaged 60-70 hours per week, up until October, then we all worked 24/7 through Christmas.  We had extended shopping hours, but we were still closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas.  In fact, we opened the Mall on both days to help out a local shelter, and we fed the Homeless in our food court, helping to serve over 500 meals each year.  Some of the merchants came and volunteered, as we were a family.  It all seemed to work out, and we still got a few days off.  Then we slept in January.

So how did this 365-day a year shopping fever take over?  What item or purchase is so very important that a store has to come up with deep discounts, force their staff to work on holidays, just so a percentage of shoppers can scratch their shopping itch??  I just don’t need anything that badly, I guess.

The obvious culprit to this dilemma is ONLINE SHOPPING… Cyber Monday… Free Shipping,.. Special Discounts on certain days at certain times.  This has forced the brick and mortar stores and malls to ramp it up.  Stay open, offer deeper discounts… never take amoment off,because the internet never sleeps.

My Cyber Monday expenditures unfortunately consisted of paying my property taxes and my DMV fees.  No deals there.  But I did check out a few hyped sites and quite honestly, I was not that impressed.  Sites were slow to load, and basically everyone was offering free shipping and 15-30% off.  Geez, I can get that on Amazon any day of the week.

So was it worth it to come up with Gray Thursday?  Cyber Monday?  I guess we will have to wait until the analysts tell us how the numbers look.  Did we spendmore or less?  More online or more in stores?  More on Thursday, Friday, Monday or any other day?  I’ll pay attention because it’s my business to know this stuff, but in my heart, I will still mourn the loss of those days off for the employees.  Change is change… it’s not always better, it’s just different.