Dear FutureShop,
I have never been impressed with your sales and I’ve bought very little from your stores. I have, however, occasionally engaged in the perplexing behaviour of reviewing your flyer. No more. Not after seeing that you’ve “extended” Boxing Week, a fabricated sales holiday that is a grotesque perversion of the original event, even without an additional week-long extension. In case you forgot the name of the event in question, it’s “Boxing Day“.
I, for one, am not stupid enough to think that the logistics of your Chinese-based supply chain are so inefficient as to require that you spend 4% of every year dumping product. (More like 8% if we include your extended Black Friday and Cyber Monday nonsense.) Does your market research reveal that the average Canadian is truly dumb enough to believe such tripe? Actually, don’t answer that.
But seriously, it’s been half a month already. Enough.
If you want to manufacture a post-Boxing Week sales holiday, please abuse New Year’s instead. You could also steal ideas from The Brick or Leon’s; low-quality furniture hucksters are the unchallenged masters of making up reasons to throw pretend sales every week.
Sincerely,
Joe Wood
CC. TimelessFinance.com
C’mon Joe, the deals are so hot, they run them for two whole weeks without running out of stock. And this is with tons of young people wanting to spend gift cards they got for Christmas.
Here’s a personal finance mistake for you: I have in the past accumulated discount gift cards hoping to save money, but then find that those times I do want/need to buy things, they are found much cheaper at some store other than the ones I have gift cards for.
I see where Leon’s has agreed to buy The Brick. I always thought of Leon’s as a classier operator, and made a fair bit of money investing in the stock years ago.
Your first two sentences absolutely excoriated FS in a far more concise way than I did. Props.
There’s actually a thread on the Canadian Money Forum about The Brick stock, which obviously turned into a discussion of the merger. I originally panned the stock. Then it got bought by Leon’s and anybody who bought in since 2009 made money. I’m now bearish on the consolidated entity for a variety of reasons which I explain in much greater detail in that thread.
“Does your market research reveal that the average Canadian is truly dumb enough to believe such tripe?”
I point you to your own most popular blog entry “Are Canadians Money Stupid?”
And the answer, in case we didn’t know, is a resounding yes (but no more stupid than other Western countries).
I enjoyed this editorial from yesterday:
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/1310824–our-dangerous-addiction-to-borrowing-editorial
I read an interesting post today on Boomer and Echo. Basically it said “yeah debt ratios are high, but you need to look at the individual composition of the debt to get a fulsome picture, and in Canada a lot of debt is mortgage debt”. My response was “Right, so people owe a ton of money on mortgages they can’t pay off for decades, at rates that will inevitably skyrocket, secured by assets that will almost certainly decline in value to a point where many debtors will be underwater.” Grab some popcorn.
The comparable USA debt ratios were mostly mortgage based too, and now 1 in 4 houses in the US is underwater (cf Suze Orman show last Saturday night)
Won’t end well I tell you!