The waiting week

Field note, the last week of October.

The feed has begun to fill with crossed-out prices. Not the real ones yet; the warm-up. Countdown stickers. Something is coming. A brand or two that could not hold and went early. The rest of the pages look the way they always look, at full price, and the orders have gone thin.

This is the last full-price week of the year, and the customer knows it as well as the brand does. She has done this before. She has a fair idea of what the number will be on the eleventh, a better idea of what it will be at the end of the month, and the item sits in her basket, unbought, waiting.

Every year the same thing happens in the reporting. A soft last week of October is read as weakness. Somebody asks whether the creative is tired. Somebody pulls the audiences apart. A plan that was fine gets touched, and touched again, in the week before the one that matters most.

The number hides something plainer than a problem.

The regional peak does not begin with a rush. It begins with a pause, and the pause is a lesson the customer learned, from this brand and every brand around it, over years of Novembers in which the price always fell if she waited. She learned it well. She is doing what she was taught.

The waiting is the bill for that, and it arrives before the discount does.