As Black Friday looms, retailers brace for holiday season looking more break than make

Among the words and phrases most of us hope never to hear again — like “social distancing” and “self-quarantining” — is this one: “in a normal year …”

As in, “in a normal year we would be looking forward to Thanksgiving, and the retail industry would be nervously awaiting to see how the all-important month-long Christmas shopping season turned out.”

Since 2020 is as far from a normal year as it’s possible to get (outside of total warfare or alien invasion), Thanksgiving has become one more holiday we’re not getting, not in normal form anyway, and one more missed deadline by which we had hoped to be free of COVID-19.

The retail industry is still wondering about the performance of the holiday shopping season, but this time instead of — or more properly, in addition to — traditional factors like the economy and weather, now it has a viral pandemic to amp up the trepidation.

It wasn’t as though the retailing industry didn’t already have enough to fret about, what with the continued decline and contraction of bricks-and-mortar retail.

It’s not as though there hasn’t already been some rethinking about the industry’s approach to Black Friday. Having shoppers swarm a store to grab something likely to be just as available later in the season when merchants are trying to clear merchandise, with all the attendant extra costs and the occasional ugly scenes of shoppers doing literal battle with one another, wasn’t proving to be worth the bother. A few retailers have been retreating from the practice of opening Thanksgiving night or very early the day after.

Now they’ve got another reason for ditching Black Friday madness: the pandemic threat. Problem is, that spread threatens every other day of the shopping season as well. The threat comes not only from illness but from the economic impact of the pandemic. Will shoppers retreat from the habit of spending a lot of money this season, either because they don’t have it due to layoffs or the fear of losing jobs? Or will they spend just as much as in prior years, or maybe even more as compensation for everything else that’s been taken away, but do it from the comfort and safety of their own homes via online?

We weren’t supposed to be at this point.

The notion that the coronavirus would be beaten into submission by Easter was considered a dubious proposition to start with, but now there is growing skepticism whether this will be done with by Easter 2021. Already the resumption of in-classroom education is being pushed back later into January by many districts. The calendar is being cleared of events that organizers had hoped could be postponed until early 2021. And once the virus itself is neutralized as a threat, the economy itself still needs to be cleansed of the economic tidal waves it loosed.

The regional economy did get a sliver of good news in the last week with the Federal Aviation Administration giving clearance for Boeing’s 737 Max to fly again, but it’s not much to go on.

It will take months to clear the backlog of planes assembled but not delivered, which have been parked at places like Moses Lake for months while Boeing comes up with fixes and regulators decide if those fixes are sufficient. In the meantime, global passenger air traffic volumes have been demolished, orders for planes have been postponed or canceled and Boeing has wiped out thousands of jobs that aren’t likely to come back even if the passengers and orders do you. That’s a lot of income to take out of the economy to be replaced only by uncertainty, hardly a good exchange for anyone.

The news that vaccines now in development show promising results is similarly scant reassurance, welcome though it well may be purely from the standpoint of public health. Further testing, regulatory review and approval, manufacturing, distribution and administering the vaccine will take time, stretching well beyond the holiday season even under expedited schedules in which nothing goes wrong.

Time is what many retailers don’t have.

Bankruptcy courts already are stuffed with lawyers sorting out the remnants of the chain operators, a situation that was well underway long before the pandemic. Those that have remained open have done so through a patchwork of draining resources, grant and bailout money, grabbing what online crumbs Amazon hasn’t yet scarfed up and a lot of patience, hope and resilience.

Those are running low, and a bad holiday retailing season will deplete remaining reserves for many.

Sorry to be such a fountain of cheerfulness on the eve of what is normally a month of festivity. But by now most of us realize there’s nothing “normal” to anything about 2020, so this is an appropriate, if grim, capper to the year. As with so much that COVID-19 has touched, many of the trends in retailing were already in motion. The pandemic simply delivered them much earlier and all at once. Happy holidays.