COVID-19 Stella Uno Malo Retail “Showrooming.”

Mall-walking at the Prudential Mall has become integral to my life in the last 13 months.

“Showrooming” was a phrase featured in my 7/28/2017 blog that described and defined as using brick and mortar stores for trying on clothes and handling hard goods prior to an online purchase at a lower cost.

“Showrooming” was a phrase often bandied about in the aisles of the now locally extinct Best Buy stores; now both the Landmark Center and Mass. and Newbury are now closed.

Mall-walking nowadays at the Prudential Center offers precious little eye candy or opportunities for “showrooming.”

At the high end Godiva Chocolatiers is gone as is the omnipresent Loft.

More surprising is the shuttered Microsoft slot. One would think the onslaught of e-commerce being quickened by COVID-19 that there would be a “showrooming” effect…but no.

Will the “showrooming” aspect of brick and mortar retail rebound?

Yes, but just a tad.

Materialism, oft times referred to as “retail therapy” is the essence of shopping.

Folks like having something in their hands. Shopping releases a flood of endorphins as potent as jock rush or sex.

E-commerce can never replace the intense gratification of physical purchase.

However, the “new normal” of e-commerce/delivery/pick-up has become the “normal new.”

Folks entering pubescence now have never known a world in which an in-person purchase of a tangible asset is the norm.

“Showrooming” will return as a way for retailers, especially clothing stores to cement the buying habits of a clientele already predisposed to purchase a specific good.

“Showrooming” as a practice enabled by COVID-19 protocols will be so ubiquitous as to make the word “showrooming” extinct.

The “new normal.”

Indeed.

RULES OF THE GAME #2: Impressionism.

You

never get a first chance

to make a last impression.

RULES OF THE GAME #1

The Gallanter Rule states that the exception that proves the rule will ALWAYS be the most extreme exception.

COVID-19 New Normal Stella Quattro Bono

1* Kitchen floor is so clean one could eat off it in spite of the fact that home meal preparation is the new normal.

2* Mall walking at the Prudential Mall for 90 minutes x 60 seconds at 2 steps per second is 10,800 steps burning about 600 calories is the new normal.

3* Deleting robocall voicemails 3 times daily is the new normal.

4* The “new normal” is now, after 11 months, the new normal.

COVID-19 Stella Uno: Gratitude

COVID-19 has brought a variety of challenges almost unimaginable 2 years ago. Sadly, “the new normal’ is not just a cliche’ but an all too accurate description of all too many lives.

Gratitude is needed and necessary. Not solely for the morally justifiable impulse of energizing daily life but to rise above the very real challenges of our very long today.

COVID-10 testing, as performed at the Boston Medical Center at 801 Mass. Ave. through the rear entrance, has revealed this blogger to be negative.

Not all are as fortunate.

Furthermore, my lease runs though April 2022 so I have the security of knowing where I will be living for the foreseeable future.

Not all are as fortunate.

Gratitude.

HAIKU 5*7*5* Machine Demolition

I’ll sip a few beers

The Machine demolition

I’ll just sip my tears

COVID-19 Tres Stella Uno, Dos,Tres

Stella Uno, Boyhood: Civil rights

Stella Dos, Adulthood: Internet

Stella Tres, Maturehood: COVID-19

SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION

Greetings to all of readers of stevegallanter.wordpress.com!

I am happy and more than a little proud that 2020 is the most read year of my blogs since the brain candy began in 2012.

I endeavor to improve the writing.

‘Gratitude’ is the only word that comes to mind knowing that folks are taking the time to read what is written.

HAIKU 5*7*5* Autumn is calling

The leaves are falling

Greenish leaves with brownish tips

Autumn is calling

BLACK FRIDAY 2023 has changed both the meaning and practice of Black Friday by accelerating the changes endemic to the pandemic.

BLACK FRIDAY, kicks off the Christmas shopping season in spite of the fact that “my” 231 Mass. Ave, Boston CVS has had Christmas thingys since Halloween, and don’t give me any of that ‘Happy Holidays’ stuff,  as surely as the Detroit Lions vs. whoever in the N.F.L. has been played since 1934.

http://www.sportscasting.com

Even “cultural” retailers such as the Guitar Center on Boylston St. offer 15% off!

Ker chang!

  Target; or perhaps ‘Tar Jhay’ for the holiday..? offers a Samsung 65″ Smart 4K Crystal HDR UHD TV TV7000 for only $499!  In Titan Gray of course.

As a server I work mostly at night.  So after making my list, and checking it twice, I will awake in the A.M;  ingest a dash of caffeine and spend, spend, spend!

Such was not always the case.

Indeed, methinks that the emergence of Black Friday as a retail holiday…

… prompts thoughts of my parents both of whom are no longer and…

…the passing of what Tom Brokaw called “the Greatest Generation,” who lived through the Great Depression and WWII, which is to say my parents.

My mother, Doris was born in 1925, and my father, Shelly was born in 1927. 

On occasion I would want some kind of mild extravagance, such as a 1st. baseman’s mitt.  My cost-effective father would reply by lecturing me with stories of playing kick-the-can and being grateful that his father, Edward Gallanter, who worked 3 jobs, was not among the legions of unemployed men in the Brooklyn of the 1930’s.

When I became a bartender Dad was all too willing to tell the tale of walking to the local tavern to buy a “bag of ice,” for .02 a bag in the days before refrigerators became standard. 

Mom hailed from New Kensington, PA, a manufacturing city 19 miles NW of Pittsburgh.  Her father, Wiley O. Jack, was a partner in a local Ford dealership.  During WWII very few cars were manufactured for retail sale as the auto makers of that era, Packard and Studebaker among them, retooled their assembly lines for the war effort.  My maternal grandfather made his living by servicing the cars he had already sold.

On occasion Mom would educate my brother Peter and I about the rationing of sugar, flour and eggs during the Great Depression.

I am on very safe ground when I ponder the thought that neither of my parents would ever think of ‘Black Friday‘ as retail therapy.

  http://investopedia.com tells us that the Black Friday that formed my parents’ hearts and minds occurred on October 25, 1929 when the stock market lost 11% of its net worth.

This pre-nuclear money meltdown turned into panic as the technology of analog telephone systems couldn’t keep up with panicked investors dumping their holdings.  Banks, being substantial institutional investors, lost their worth in the pre-F.D.I.C. era and throngs flocked to banks to withdraw their cash savings while there was still cash to meet their demands.

Black Friday had made a previous appearance in the financial lexicon in the 19th. century on September 24, 1869 when financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fisk sought to corner and privatize the gold supply.  When this scheme collapsed it was dubbed ‘Black Friday.’ 

It is certainly a viable concept that those with an education in the economic history of our country knew of the 1869 scandal when the stock market crash of 1929 occurred.

www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/…/grant-black-friday

The contemporary usage of Black Friday’s earliest mention seems to have been in January of 1966 when the Philadelphia Police Dept(PPD) used the term to describe the crowds in downtown Philadelphia on the day after Thanksgiving.

http://www.sensationalcolor.com

In a more casual way the term Black Friday was bandied about by retailers to refer to the final month of the year which would pull the given retailer into the ‘black’ of profitability.  Research did not reveal any specific date or author for this phrase but it certainly has been in usage since the beginning of my business awareness.

The 21st. century brought the coinage of ‘Cyber Monday’ referring to the huge volume of online shopping that begins the week after Thanksgiving as those put off by the stampedes of shoppers at brick and mortar locations and with conflicting obligations click on to innumerable web sites to let their cursors do the shopping.

Cyber Monday was coined in 2005, just after Boston became a DSL city in 2003, by the National Retail Federation’s Shop.org to encourage and promote virtual shopping.

COVID-19 has made Cyber Monday the ‘new normal’ that has become this decade’s most tiresome, albeit accurate, cliche’.  And while I am more than tired of the phrase the description is numbingly accurate.

…Sigh…

Black Friday didn’t become the catch phrase it is now until the mid-1990s when the World War II generation, which was born in the 1920s as my parents were, began to pass.

My aunt Thelma Allera, born 1925, was the last of my older relatives to live in this world of ours.

Contemporary usage of Black Friday no longer carries the baggage it did during my long-ago youth.

Black Friday became the brightest of Fridays…until 2020.

COVID-19  closed many retail venues outright and shortened the hours of many.  “My” CVS at 231 Mass. Ave, Boston cut its hours from a 12 midnight closing to a 10 P.M. closing.

Indeed, the stressful, joyful shopping of Downtown Crossing, Boylston Sta. and Charles st. can now be accomplished with the touch of a smartphone.

Cyber Monday was once a promotional gambit to entice the early adapters of technology.  In 2023 virtually all Christmas oriented retail businesses have adapted by necessity en masse in the post COVID era rather than in the slow migration of the Digital Decade of 2010-2019.

Black Friday may well be measured by sites clicked on to and Amazon orders placed and the always increasing number of FedEx and UPS trucks navigating the narrow streets of the East Fens.

COVID-19 transformed Black Friday.