The Fred Meyer on Hawthorne had wrapping paper out on October 5. I noticed because I was there for cat litter and had to walk the seasonal aisle to reach it, past pallets of ribbon that were not there the week before. I assumed somebody in merchandising had gotten impatient.
Then Amazon ran Prime Day on the thirteenth and fourteenth, having shoved it out of July and into the middle of fall. Target ran Deal Days on exactly those two days. Walmart ran its Big Save event the week before. Best Buy stacked its own sale on top of all of it. The wrapping paper was not impatience. It was a forecast.
One company moved a holiday it invented six years ago, and the entire retail calendar moved with it.
Owning the calendar is a more durable advantage than owning the category, because the calendar decides when everyone else is allowed to speak.
Here is the part that gets lost. Prime Day is not a sale. A sale is a price. Prime Day is an occasion, and occasions belong to whoever named them. When Target counterprograms, it has to explain itself in Amazon's terms: same window, same urgency, same implied deadline. Competitors who counterprogram a rival's holiday are still working that holiday's hours.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Somebody pins a Q4 calendar to the wall in August, and by September that calendar is a reaction document. Every date on it is defined by a date somebody else picked. That is not planning. That is defense with a nicer template.
The alternative is not to out-shout an invented holiday. It is to invent one nobody is contesting. REI closed its stores on Black Friday and told people to go outside, and five years later that is still REI's day and it is still not a discount. Salt & Straw drops a flavor series every month and the drop itself is the event, no coupon required. Both of those are calendars, owned outright, and both are cheap compared to buying two days of October back from Amazon.
Competitors who counterprogram a rival's holiday are still working that holiday's hours.
So the season now runs from October 13 to whenever December gives out, which is eleven weeks of everyone shouting the same two syllables at the same tired people. If you did not choose that shape, notice who did. Meanwhile Truffles has located my apartment's version of the ribbon pallet, which is the one box I carried up from storage on Sunday. He sleeps on it. He is unbothered by the calendar. I am trying to learn something from him and getting nowhere.