Boxing Day 2008

Boxing Day Sale used to be an event. Customers expected big discounts on electronic products.

However, I thought the stores' extended holiday return policy and the Boxing Day sale were contradicting each other. The objective of the business was revenue - the more the merrier.

The perfect scenario was people bought all their gifts before Christmas and then bought more on Boxing Day. The store made more profits on the Christmas presents, then less but still making some on the products they were eager to get rid of on Boxing Day.

Information travels faster, and product life-cycle speed up. Previously, newer products came out once a year to replace the ancestors. These days there can be a few generations of the similar products within a year. Instead of holding the stock till the end of year, the stores planned different types of clearances all year round.

Boxing Day is no longer the only time of the year to get retiring model of electronic products. People are actually expecting stores or distributors to promote their new products by lowering prices. One of the headaches of the stores was to deal with the excessive returns after Boxing Day.

As a customer, if you bought an item for Christmas, then on Boxing Day saw the same or a similar item at a lower price. You would naturally return the pricier one. Under that assumption, even the stores might have numerous transactions on Boxing Day, but they might get more returns than they expected afterward. Moreover, products sold on Boxing Day had a generally lower profit margin which also shrank the revenue of the stores.

If you have seen the lineups at customer service after Christmas, you will know what I mean.

There are not much good deals this Boxing Day. I suspect the retailers and distributors finally got it figured out. The return line will be shorter and hopefully they will end up making more.