Business
With two months to Christmas, here’s what retail leaders expect for holiday shopping
There’s just two months until Christmas Eve, and retailers are meeting a more cautious shopper with earlier offerings.
Most retailers won’t report third-quarter results or updated holiday expectations until just before Thanksgiving, largely considered the sector’s most important week of the year. By then, many shoppers will have already started checking off holiday shopping lists.
Amazon’s October Prime Day sales event and competitors’ ever-earlier Black Friday deals grab some portion of the holiday wallet share. The unofficial kickoff to the holiday shopping season comes as executives point to a bifurcation in consumer spending, with lower-income consumers feeling the strain on their budgets, and as a government shutdown and tariff costs threaten purchasing power.
Kohl’s is among the retailers chasing holiday shopping early with hopes of boosting the total haul.
“We want to make sure we’re driving that early consideration knowing that they’re shopping early,” Kohl’s Chief Marketing Officer Christie Raymond said at a media event earlier this month.
The off-mall department store is starting its holiday marketing campaign next week, a week earlier than last year, when it waited until after the election. In the coming days it will be breaking out the rest of the holiday merchandise not already set out in stores.
A key part of Kohl’s holiday strategy is to capture shoppers not only early, but often.
Raymond said during the last holiday season, between November and January, shoppers made “15 plus trips” on average to stores across the industry, but checked out with smaller baskets. Those findings were based on a survey that Kohl’s conducted with a third-party research firm.
“[Consumers are] doing the work to get what they want at the price they want to pay,” she said.
While Academy Sports and Outdoors CEO Steve Lawrence agreed that shoppers are savvy when it comes to price monitoring, he said he expects customers “to aggregate their spending around those key shopping moments on the calendar where they know they can get the best deals.”
Both Kohl’s and Academy Sports cater largely to a middle-income shopper. Still, Lawrence said consumers are paying close attention to discount events.
“If we run the same promotion this year that we ran last year, there’s higher take rate on it,” he said. “I think that’s a sign customers are really savvy, and they’re figuring out when it’s the right time to shop.”
Shifting shopping habits
Lawrence said that while promotions are part of every holiday season’s playbook, Academy Sports will be tweaking how it runs discounts this year in light of higher engagement with the deals.
“If last year we ran a promotion for 10 days, maybe I only run it for 4 days over the Thanksgiving weekend,” he said. “Maybe instead of having a whole brand promoted, maybe it’s only the key categories within that brand, right? Or maybe in some cases, it might be promoting at a slightly lower discount.”
Raymond said Kohl’s is seeing shoppers reaching for lower-price options and expects that to continue during the holiday season.
“Customers maybe were purchasing a premium brand, but we are seeing them trading down to private brands,” she said. “We think we’re in actually a great position to capitalize on that.”
A private brand is one made for and sold by only one retailer, allowing for more control over design and, importantly, cost. That can mean lower prices for shoppers and higher margins for the retailer than a national brand.
Shoppers carry Macy’s and Nordstrom bags at Broadway Plaza in Walnut Creek, California, US, on Monday, Dec. 16, 2024. The Bureau of Economic Analysis is scheduled to release personal spending figures on December 20.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
While Kohl’s doesn’t disclose the proportion of its sales that are private label, Chief Merchandising Officer Nick Jones said it’s not as high as it used to be, adding there’s opportunity to boost that share this holiday season, particularly for shoppers trying to stretch their wallets.
About 23% of Academy Sports business is private label, the company has said.
“In a lot of cases, [our private label] is our best expression of value,” Lawrence said. “Our goal is to be at or better than the best price on a given day.”
However, Lawrence said, innovation has to continue to inspire sales.
‘Cautiously optimistic’
The retail industry has repeatedly described its customer in recent quarters as “choiceful,” to indicate thoughtful spending, but also “resilient.” Executives continue to use those descriptors, or synonyms for them, for the upcoming holiday season.
“I think certainly with inflation in certain categories, it’s put some pressure on spending power,” Lawrence said. “But you know, what we’ve also seen is customers are very resilient. They do come out during the key shopping time periods. They came out for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, back-to-school. We expect they’re going to come out again for holiday.”
Dick’s Sporting Goods Executive Chairman Ed Stack told CNBC this week he thought the consumer was “a little bit stressed” this season, but that he’s “cautiously optimistic.”
“If you’re going to provide value to the consumer, and they can see that, feel that value — and I’m not talking about from a price standpoint, could be innovation … then they are going to come and they are going to buy,” Stack said.
Executives for all three retailers agree inventory positions for holiday will be normal, despite tariff uncertainty that many feared would affect order volumes. None of the three were expecting merchandise shortages.
“I don’t think [inventory availability] is going to be any different than it has been in the past,” Stack said. “That really super hot item that everybody wants? That’s probably going to be in short supply, like it is every year.”
Business
SC permits Centre to review Rs 6,000cr additional dues on Vodafone-Idea – The Times of India
NEW DELHI: The Union govt on Monday convinced the Supreme Court to permit the department of telecom to review its demand of Rs 6,000 crore additional adjusted gross revenue demand for the FY 2016-17 on Vodafone-Idea. Chief Justice B R Gavai and Justice K Vinod Chandran was informed by solicitor general Tushar Mehta that since the previous round of litigation, in which Vodafone was ordered to pay the AGR dues, there had been a change of circumstance as the Centre has acquired a 49% stake in the company. Mehta said, “We do not want the company, in which the govt has a huge investment, to go bankrupt to make 20 crore people suffer. ‘Govt wants to prevent monopoly’ Govt wants more players in the mobile telecom sector to prevent monopoly,” said solicitor general Tushar Mehta. Vodafone through senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi had argued that the SC had frozen the AGR dues at Rs 58,254 crore as of 2016-17 and that the DoT cannot raise additional AGR dues in breach of the SC order. Govt had converted Rs 36,950 cr dues as its 49% equity in the telecom service provider.
The bench noticed the element of public interest in the case and permitted the Centre to take a fresh view of the additional AGR demands, especially when the issue is purely in the policy domain and involves the interests of 20 crore people. “We see no reason why the Centre should be prevented from taking a relook at the additional AGR dues,” the bench said.
NEW DELHI: Govt has approved seven projects worth Rs 5,532 crore, out of 249 proposals received under the Electronics Components Manufacturing Scheme, electronics and IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Monday. The minister said the production of electronics components from the approved projects is likely to reduce the import bill of around Rs 20,000 crore. “Seven plants under electronics components have been approved. In coming days, more projects will be approved. We expect these projects to reduce import bill by around Rs 20,000 crore,” Vaishnaw said. The minister said that proposals for the manufacturing of multi-layer printed circuit boards or motherboard base, camera modules, copper laminates, and polypropylene films (used in capacitors for consumer electronics) have been approved.
OpenAI has released new estimates of the number of ChatGPT users who exhibit possible signs of mental health emergencies, including mania, psychosis or suicidal thoughts.
The company said that around .07% of ChatGPT users active in a given week exhibited such signs, adding that its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot recognizes and responds to these sensitive conversations.
While OpenAI maintains these cases are “extremely rare,” critics said even a small percentage may amount to hundreds of thousands of people, as ChatGPT recently reached 800 million weekly active users, per boss Sam Altman.
As scrutiny mounts, the company said it built a network of experts around the world to advise it.
Those experts include more than 170 psychiatrists, psychologists, and primary care physicians who have practiced in 60 countries, the company said.
They have devised a series of responses in ChatGPT to encourage users to seek help in the real world, according to OpenAI.
But the glimpse at the company’s data raised eyebrows among some mental health professionals.
“Even though .07% sounds like a small percentage, at a population level with hundreds of millions of users, that actually can be quite a few people,” said Dr. Jason Nagata, a professor who studies technology use among young adults at the University of California, San Francisco.
“AI can broaden access to mental health support, and in some ways support mental health, but we have to be aware of the limitations,” Dr. Nagata added.
The company also estimates .15% of ChatGPT users have conversations that include “explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.”
OpenAI said recent updates to its chatbot are designed to “respond safely and empathetically to potential signs of delusion or mania” and note “indirect signals of potential self-harm or suicide risk.”
ChatGPT has also been trained to reroute sensitive conversations “originating from other models to safer models” by opening in a new window.
In response to questions by the BBC on criticism about the numbers of people potentially affected, OpenAI said that this small percentage of users amounts to a meaningful amount of people and noted they are taking changes seriously.
The changes come as OpenAI faces mounting legal scrutiny over the way ChatGPT interacts with users.
In one of the most high-profile lawsuits recently filed against OpenAI, a California couple sued the company over the death of their teenage son alleging that ChatGPT encouraged him to take his own life in April.
The lawsuit was filed by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine and was the first legal action accusing OpenAI of wrongful death.
In a separate case, the suspect in a murder-suicide that took place in August in Greenwich, Connecticut posted hours of his conversations with ChatGPT, which appear to have fuelled the alleged perpetrator’s delusions.
More users struggle with AI psychosis as “chatbots create the illusion of reality,” said Professor Robin Feldman, Director of the AI Law & Innovation Institute at the University of California Law. “It is a powerful illusion.”
She said OpenAI deserved credit for “sharing statistics and for efforts to improve the problem” but added: “the company can put all kinds of warnings on the screen but a person who is mentally at risk may not be able to heed those warnings.”
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