New Topic- Shopping Much?

With 2008 being such a disastrous year for retail, all hopes were on a recovery for 2009- especially the holiday period. That period between Thanksgiving and the new year can help a company's sales significantly and considering January is usually a retail disaster every year, a much needed boost to the bottom line for the entire year.

The anticipation was high and the figures, well...not so much. All reports started hopeful but aside from some busier than usual internet shopping in the days after Thanksgiving the end result was but a smidge higher than last year.On top of that, stores are desperately trying to wean consumers off the 2008 sales habit they had created with high inventories and low sales- a "fire sale" mentality.

In addition to the high rate of unemployment and the corresponding smaller household budgets for most, articles stated that consumers were happier with spending money on "experiences" rather than goods.

Read the NYT article about the retail macro-climate


2010 seems designated to be a year of change for consumer habits:

Are you looking to spend on experiences rather than goods?
What makes you want to spend right now?
Will the caution of personal shopping budgets continue or will the purse strings loosen later in the year?
Are we shaping the younger generation's attitude in any particular direction as has been the case in the past after periods of abundance or hardship? If so, how will we see it?

Discuss.

add-on to last post

This is sure to be an ongoing topic. An additional complication to the timing conversation is the apparent "leakage" of ads to the internet that will appear in print in months to come.

Does it matter? What do you think?

here's the article from The Cut

First Topic- BLOGGERS!

The internet fashion community quietly snickered when the New York Times wrote about fashion bloggers in the front row. This seemed to be news to them. This article bounced around for days and not in a cool way. It was like they had awoken from a Snow White sleep and the fashion media game had changed! In real life, there are interesting points- not that Tavi will be editor-in-chief of Vogue next week- but the ideas of immediacy and youth (freshness of eyes) vs. age (and experience and knowledge of fashion) have been questioned.
So I ask:
- will we stop reading magazines or will the big pretty pictures always compel us?
- will magazines have to continue to do their "memo" pages when we already know about this stuff (read it on the internet) and focus more on the fantasy of fashion?
- what is aimed at who? Obviously there are those who trawl the internet more frequently than others- does it matter?
- will we listen to a quirky 13 year old talk to us about fashion? I mean, what does she know? Or does she?
- what do we learn from blogs? Do we care or they for entertainment purposes only?

Discuss

Here's the NYT article

Why?

I really love to recycle but enough is enough. I can only read the same information that is being re-posted again and again for so long. Cutblog pulls from NYT, Racked pulls from Cutblog, articles get thrown around Twitter. And the glaring omission? Commentary. Fashion used to be about discussion and analysis- that gave it a whole other dimension. Where is that? Let's bring it back.

My goal is to post a topic of the week and have you all comment on it. I know a lot of really intelligent and knowledgeable people and think they might have things to say. I think this could be interesting.

Lets give it a whirl.