Richard Swerdlow reflects on how quickly stores in San Francisco get ready for the December holiday.
When I was a kid, San Francisco’s Union Square was filled with beautiful stores and stylish shoppers. I have dim memories of browsing in retail luxury with my mother elegant in a hat and gloves, as ladies wore when shopping downtown. Those days are gone, but I still love shopping in Union Square.
So recently, when I was in one of the few big department stores left in downtown San Francisco, I was amazed to find it’s already Christmas. The calendar said October, but Santa Claus has come to town, the store merrily decorated with a forest of artificial trees and twinkly lights.
Halloween is weeks off, Thanksgiving two months away, but it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Union Square. Fellow shoppers seemed as baffled as I was, as if we had entered a Time Machine which erased autumn, teleporting us straight to winter.
But maybe we shouldn’t have been so disoriented. This retail phenomenon even has a name. It’s called Christmas creep, with stores hoping to motivate customers to start holiday shopping early, extending the profitable Christmas season. Some stores go all in on Christmas creep, with holly jolly decor showing up as early as August.